Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – China will start a major oil and gas (oil and gas) project in South China Sea (LCS).
Quoting Asia Times Financial from a local news site Netease, Chinese oil and gas companies have discovered fields with 200 million tonnes of oil and 300 billion tonnes of gas.
Drilling will also be carried out in the gas field in the near future. The extraction will be carried out at the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) rig.
China is also said to have completed the development of a storage platform there that can accommodate 53,000 tons of oil and gas. This storage will be used in January 2021.
In detail, the media said the drilling was carried out in the Lingsui 17-2 field, as deep as 150 km south of Hainan Island. It is estimated that there are billion cubic meters of gas there.
Lingsui 17-2 itself was announced to be discovered in 2014. This is making headlines in China, as it is the first deep sea gas field discovery in the country in the LCS.
In fact, the LCS region is the ocean that China is fighting over with many countries. Among them are Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysia, sometimes Indonesia especially Natuna.
For decades, oil and gas companies believed there were massive, untapped oil reserves under the sea.
Some estimates mention the amount of oil and underwater gas more than the Gulf in the Middle East.
But little drilling and production has been done because of territorial disputes.
This is because China claims the entire sea as its sovereign territory despite the fact that the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea says the sea is international waters.
China claims the concept of nine dotted lines and often sends the military to monitor the area. This ultimately led the US to enter under the pretext of securing freedom of navigation and allies.
According to Asia Financial TimesIt also seems that the location of China’s gas drilling this time is in a dispute with Vietnam.
Previously, a Chinese naval vessel was said to have prevented drilling projects from being carried out in waters off Vietnam so that the country had to pay fines to contractors.
Reported The Diplomat, Vietnam had to pay compensation of US $ 1 billion (Rp. 14.6 trillion, assuming Rp. 14,621 / US $) to two international oil companies for canceling their contracts in these waters.
Meanwhile in 2019, China’s newly discovered oil reserves reached 1.124 billion tonnes.
Energy discovery and related data, according to Asia Times Financial usually not exposed clearly because it is a state secret.
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