Chevron has started its first natural gas production from the Bangka Field Development Project off the Indonesian coast, the group's subsidiary Chevron Indonesia Company Ltd said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Bangka project has a capacity of 110 million cubic feet of natural gas and 4,000 barrels of condensate per day.
The Bangka field, in which Chevron has a 62-percent interest, is the first stage of the Indonesia Deepwater Development (IDD) Project that the U.S. group operates in East Kalimantan.
Chevron, which has been active in Indonesia for 92 years, has produced 12 billion barrels of oil so far from onshore oil fields in Riau, Sumatra and from offshore fields in East Kalimantan.
Indonesia's proved natural gas reserves are the thirteenth largest in the world, and the second largest in the Asia-Pacific region after China, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has estimated, using Oil & Gas Journal data.
Although Chevron sticks to its gas production in Indonesia, it has been marketing the sale of its geothermal energy projects worth over US$2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Chevron's latest efforts to raise funds will include selling off US$5 billion in Asian assets, the WSJ says.
Some oil majors are leaving South East Asia, but in central Asia, in Kazakhstan, a Chevron-led consortium had approved a US$36.8-billion output expansion plan for the giant Tengiz oilfield. The consortium also includes Exxon Mobil and Russia's Lukoil.
Plans are to bolster production to 39 million tons of crude per year, or 850,000 barrels per day, by 2022. At present, the field yields 27 million tons per year, which represents over a third of Kazakhstan's overall crude oil output. At peak capacity, Tengiz - one of the biggest oil fields in the world - is expected to have an output close to what the UK produces at present.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More