Thailand’s PTT is looking at new sources for liquefied natural gas such as Oman, North America and West Africa as it looks to diversify its portfolio amid geopolitical disruption, a senior company executive told Reuters on Tuesday.
The largest LNG importer in Southeast Asia relies on spot supplies to meet 50% of its demand. Thailand boosted imports from the United States this year after exports from Qatar, its biggest supplier, were severely disrupted when the Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz.
“We are not just relying on any (one) supplier like Qatar, we still look to explore the possibilities,” Bandhit Thamprajamchit, chief operating officer of PTT’s upstream petroleum and gas business, told Reuters on the sidelines of the Gastech conference.
“Canada is also being explored, as well as Mexico,” he said, adding that West Africa and other Middle East countries were also potential sources, noting that Oman was located outside the Strait of Hormuz.
Bandhit told the conference that PTT was looking to secure high-certainty LNG supply in the near term to ensure energy security.
Oman’s LNG exports hit an all-time high of 1.167 million metric tons in August, data from analytics firm Kpler showed. The country exported 11.521 million tons of LNG last year.
Bandhit told Reuters the state major is seeking to collaborate with its partners to jointly purchase or load cargoes to reduce costs.
“We are collaborating with our partners, especially those that are LNG buyers in Thailand, to see if we can say, for instance, like co-purchase, co-load, to save the landed cost, the cost of the LNG,” he said, but declined to name the partners.
PTT is expanding its LNG import capacity to 27 million tons per year (tpy) in three years’ time, from about 19 million tpy currently.
The company aimed to grow LNG demand by 10 million tpy by 2030 and another 15 million tpy by 2035, Bandhit said.
(Reporting by Florence Tan, Emily Chow and Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by John Mair)