A P750-million, 1.5-megawatt power plant will soon rise in Bogo City after the Department of Energy (DoE) discovered natural gas that can be turned into electricity and power a small area in the city.
The gas power plant will be constructed in Barangay Libertad by Forum Energy Philippines, which will also process the gas and sell it to Desco, a leading provider of petroleum and geothermal power and services in the Philippines.
DoE Assistant Secretary Ramon Oca, who met with Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia on Thursday, said Desco will supply electricity from the gas plant to Cebu Electric Cooperative Inc., which supplies electricity to households in the northern area of the province.
“It’s a natural gas, another alternative source of power, which is cleaner,” Oca said.
Oca personally visited Garcia to ask her support for the project which will be commissioned later this month or early October. He also said that further exploration will be conducted in Bogo to check out other areas that could also yield natural gas deposits.
“Hopefully we’ll find more gas para ma-expand natin ang power plants…There seems to be indication that there are more,” Oca said.
The Libertad gas field was reportedly discovered in the late 1950s but was not developed. A testing program was carried out from 1993 to 1995 involving the drilling of seven wells, with one of these testing positive for gas.
In Alegria town, an international petroleum consortium led by a Chinese petroleum company has expressed interest to pursue oil exploration in two barangays to determine the commercial value of the reported oil supply in those areas.
China International Mining Petroleum Company Limited (CIMP) and Polyard Petroleum International Group Limited will be drilling two wells in barangays Montpeller and Madridejos, where pocket oil wells have been discovered since the early 70s.
Oca and executives of the two petroleum mining companies earlier met Garcia asking for support. Since 2009, the CIMP has completed the seismic reprocessing and interpretation and surfaced geological investigations of the area while remote sensing study is being carried out covering 180 square kilometers.
“Let's hope that they will find oil or gas of commercial quantity in these areas,” said Garcia. “It will have tremendous impact not just for the town, not just for Cebu, but for the entire country.”
Polyard will be using 3D technology for the petroleum exploration program to see if there is, in fact, oil or gas of commercial quantity in the specified areas of Alegria. Currently, pocket wells that produce oil can be seen in Montpeller, and residents have long been using the oil to power their lamps.
During the early ’70s, Garcia said the same group conducted seismic survey in the area but the project was abandoned because they found out that the supply of oil was not of commercial quality and the equipment they were using was not technologically advanced.
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