Published September 20, 2019, 10:00
PM By Myrna
M. Velasco
On next month’s four-day scheduled
maintenance shutdown of the Malampaya gas production facility, the Department
of Energy (DOE) is assuring consumers that it has contingency measures in place
to avoid unwarranted power supply interruptions.
DOE Director Mario C. Marasigan
indicated that collaboration processes had already been sorted out with system
operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) as well as with
the generation companies that will be affected by the downtime of the gas
facility.
As submitted to the energy
department, the Malampaya production platform will be undergoing routine
maintenance on October 12-15 this year; and the relevant stakeholders had
already been informed of this since the start of the year.
Marasigan said the gas-fired
generating plants will shift to liquid fuels like diesel for one unit of the
Ilijan plant; and condensate for the gas fleets of First Gen. The other
600-megawatt block of the Ilijan plant will be on simultaneous shutdown during
Malampaya’s maintenance.
“We already coordinated with NGCP on
how we shall handle the situation. The concerned parties – including the
generation companies – already have submissions to the DOE on how they will
operate during Malampaya’s shutdown period,” the energy official said.
Marasigan added “the situation is
not really that critical – because it’s now October and demand is not really
that high.”
He qualified that fuel procurements
were already done in advance, hence, there are no expectations that this will
be affected by the recent incident in Saudi Aramco facilities.
“We are still assessing the impact
of the Saudi Aramco incident, but ideally, that should not have impact on costs
pass-on for the Malampaya shutdown because the fuel procurements for it had
already been part of inventory prior to the incident,” he stressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment