Our love-hate relationship with oil and gas

It seems like we can't quite let go of our dependence on petroleum.

The story is..

In 2003, some oil-explorers from Brunei were going into Block J and K (pink and blue) and found Petronas people there. So exploration from both sides were stopped. Brunei claims an exclusive economic zone stretching 200 nautical miles. See this googlemap I made using the coordinates from wiki. In March 2009, letters of exchange were signed and both sides agreed to the final delimitation of the maritime boundaries.

This is another example of politics going haywire. The issue is 1 year old!

Mahathir criticised Abdullah on his blog for selling out Malaysia. He quoted an estimate of 1 billion barrels of oil reserves in these two blocks. This caught the attention of the press and now even wiki has a very up-to-date article on this issue!

Putting the politics aside, the estimated 1 billion barrel worth of reserves is equivalent to about 15 more years of drilling made available for Brunei.

This is good and bad. If it turns out that we can actually reap benefits from these two blocks, then it's another 15 years of revenue pumping out of the ground. The downside is that it'll most probably delay our efforts to move away from this economically and environmentally unsustainable form of income - which is kinda sad.

This is another a very concrete evidence for energy security and why we should be working our ass off looking at alternative sources. First we are now planning to buy electricity from Malaysia, then we are at the mercy of Malaysia's 'generosity'. Perhaps we should take a sip from Singapore's cup of insecurity and learn to be on our toes a little more.. It's about time we equip ourselves better.