Published By
Myrna M. Velasco
SINGAPORE – Four
foreign companies have sent letters of intent (LOI) to the Department of Energy
(DOE) for the scheduled auction of consulting services on the data management
package of the country’s upstream petroleum service areas.
These are British firm
Zebra Data Sciences Ltd., French company CGG, American firm IHS Markit and
Malaysian firm Iraya Energies Sdn Bhd.
According to Energy
Assistant Secretary Caron Aicitel E. Lascano, the competitive bidding on the
country’s petroleum data management services will be held this September.
The timeframe targeted
by the department on the submission of bids is September 10; while post-evaluation
process by its Centralized Review and Evaluation Committee (C-REC) starts
September 15.
The consulting services
will delve with data management primarily on the 14 pre-determined areas (PDAs)
that the Philippine government will be offering to investors via its Philippine
Conventional Energy Contracting Program (PCEP). The formal launch of the
modified contracting on harnessing the country’s hydrocarbons potential will be
latter part of October this year.
Lascano noted that with
viable and efficiently managed data that they can offer to investors, the
department is hoping that they can ramp up investment interests – primarily
from the deep-pocketed foreign firms that have been showing interest in the
petroleum blocks.
Energy Undersecretary
Donato D. Marcos further indicated that “we need proper management and
packaging of the petroleum data that we have so they become more attractive to
investors.”
In the preliminary bid
submission notice posted at the DOE website, the department specified that it
is “soliciting proposals for a prospective data management service provider to
handle data viewing and data package sales of the pre-determined areas of the
PCECP.”
The pre-determined
blocks comprise of 14 service areas along six basins in various parts of the country.
Altogether, they straddle 73,576.66 square kilometers of both shallow and
deep-water drilling prospects in East Palawan, Cagayan, West Luzon, Sulu Sea,
Cotabato and Agusan-Davao basins.
The country’s
restructured petroleum contracting round will be carried out on two modes – one
shall be submission for the pre-determined areas; while the other is year-round
submission of unsolicited proposals based on the preference of investors.
At all four sub-phases
of exploration and drilling activities in investors’ work programs at the
pre-determined blocks, the Philippine government is expecting to fetch up to
US$2.4 billion worth of investments.
The PCECP is a
contracting regime that essentially replaced the Philippine Energy Contracting
Round (PECR) – which so far lasted for a decade with at least five batches of
petroleum blocks’ bidding.
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