Aceh Wants Arun Turned into Industrial Zone
16 April 2014 13:20 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Aceh provincial government plans on turning Arun NGL's assets into an industrial area once the LNG contract sale from Arun to Kogas, South Korea, ends in October 2014.
"We requested that the assets transferred. Because, if we don't use them they will just become scrap metal," Aceh Governor Zaini Abdullah said in Jakarta, yesterday during the Aceh Business Forum at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Zaini said a number of foreign investors are interested in managing these assets. "One has come to invest there—from Finland," he said.
Met at the same place, Arun's Asset Management Transiition team leader, Ramli Djafar, said that Arun's LNG facility could be turned into three industrial zones, heavy industries, medium, or small.
"For heavy industry, the LNG refinery could be diverted into a storage and regasification terminal for LNG or petrochemical and plastics industry," he said.
According to Ramli, transforming Arun into an industrial area will not require large capital disbursement as Arun already has adequate infrastructure. "There are airport, seaport, hospitals, and schools. Investors who will invest there could get cheap gas," he said.
Ramli claimed that the amount of gas in Arun's working area is still quite large, reaching 170 million standard cubic feet per day (mmscfd).
Arun LNG refinery consists of six units of LNG Trains, one condensate separation unit and one unit of LPG plant. The refinery is about 30 kilometers from the Arun gas field—operated by ExxonMobil Oil Indonesia. Since the refinery began operating in 1977, it has shipped 750 million barrels of condensate, 500 million cubic meters of LNG (4,086 cargos), and 14 million metric tons of LPG.
Since 2000, however, production dropped following the declining EMOI gas supply. As of 2007, only 9,000 barrels of condensate are produced per day, just seven percent of the initial design. LNG production only reached 18,000 cubic meters per day or 24 percent of the installed capacity, and the LPG plant no longer operates since 2000.
The government has set up the Arun LNG Regasification Terminal and Storage project, which has a designed capacity of 400 mmscfd. This is the first conversion project of an LNG plant into a regasification terminal in the world.
AYU PRIMA SANDI
