ARCO HITS IT BIG WITH GAS FIELD PROJECT; '95 FIND ONE OF THE LARGEST.Byline: Gregory J. Wilcox / Daily News Staff WriterA natural gas field jointly operated by Atlantic Richfield Co. and the Indonesian government has proved to be one of the world's largest finds of its kind this decade, the Los Angeles-based company said Tuesday. Analysis of test well data by Arco's petroleum engineering consultant, DeGolyer & MacNaughton of Dallas, shows that the field in eastern Indonesia contains more than 13 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - equal to 2.2 billion barrels of oil - and another 6.5 trillion cubic feet in possible reserves. It's the third-largest discovery of hydrocarbons in Arco's history, surpassed only by the giant Prudhoe Bay Prudhoe Bay, inlet of the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Ocean, N Alaska, in the Alaska North Slope region, east of the Colville River delta. In 1968 one of the largest oil reserves in North America was discovered in Prudhoe Bay. and Kuparuk River The Kuparak River is a river in Alaska's North Slope.[1] References 1. ^ USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). Kuparak River. Accessed Aug 20, 2007. See also
Arco said it will spend ``several hundred million'' dollars to develop the field, which it discovered in 1995. This also signals Arco's entry into the highly competitive liquefied natural gas liquefied natural gas: see under natural gas. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) A product of natural gas which consists primarily of methane. Its properties are those of liquid methane, slightly modified by minor constituents. business in Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, region of Asia (1990 est. pop. 442,500,000), c.1,740,000 sq mi (4,506,600 sq km), bounded roughly by the Indian subcontinent on the west, China on the north, and the Pacific Ocean on the east. . The company now becomes a player in a market dominated by Mobil Corp. and Total SA of France. The first order of business for Arco is finding customers for the natural gas, said company spokesman Albert Greenstein. ``This is the very early phase of a very major project,'' he said. Arco is a partner in the project with Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Occidental Petroleum Corporation ("Oxy") NYSE: OXY is an international oil and gas exploration and production company with operations in the United States, Middle East/North Africa and Latin America regions. Corp., two Japanese energy companies and Pertamina Indonesia, the world's largest marketer of liquefied natural gas. Arco will develop and operate the field and could get up to 35 percent of its yield. This eventually could increase the company's worldwide natural gas reserves by 50 percent, Greenstein said. Plans call for the gas to be brought to the surface, where it will be liquefied, pumped into special pressurized pres·sur·ize tr.v. pres·sur·ized, pres·sur·iz·ing, pres·sur·iz·es 1. To maintain normal air pressure in (an enclosure, as an aircraft or submarine). 2. tankers, shipped to market and de-liquefied. Product could be shipped to market starting in 2003. ``That's really a world-class deposit, a very significant event,'' said Pete Stark, director of research and business development at Houston-based Petroleum Information/Dwight's LLC (Logical Link Control) See "LANs" under data link protocol. LLC - Logical Link Control . Arco's stock closed Tuesday at 77-7/8, up 2-7/8. |
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