Petronas is looking to expand its operations in Burma onshore and has submitted a bid for a field there, the Malaysian state-owned company said on the day it posted a 54% rise in quarterly profits.
"At the moment in Myanmar we are only offshore and the business has been quite good," Reuters quoted Wee Yiaw Hin, Petronas’ executive vice-president of exploration and production, as saying on Thursday.
"There has been recently a bid on the onshore block and we are looking at opportunities to go onshore in Myanmar," Wee said after announcing Petronas' quarterly earnings.
In August, Burma, also known as Myanmar, closed one of its largest exploration tenders in years, just a few months after it launched a spate of political reforms.
Wee said the bidding process will end sometime next year and that he was unaware of any other Malaysian companies bidding for the same blocks, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, the South-east Asian giant said it made about 18.3 billion ringgit ($5.75 billion) in the quarter ending 30 September.
That was up from 11.9 billion ringgit in the same period last year and came on quarterly revenues of 71.8 billion ringgit, a 26% increase from a year ago.
The increase was driven by higher realised prices for crude and other commodities such as LNG, Petronas said, and came despite a downtick in production.
Petronas produced 2.03 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the quarter compared to 2.12 MMboepd a year ago – a drop of 7%.
The fall in production was a result of lower reservoir performance and higher downtime, Petronas said.
