The Indonesian navy has seized an oil tanker that allegedly stole 290,000 barrels of crude oil from Cambodia and KrisEnergy, AFP reported on Wednesday.
KrisEnergy announced that it has filed a “winding up” petition just six months after producing Cambodia’s first drops of oil, citing low production in Cambodia’s beleaguered Apsara block and the company’s compounding debt.
Cambodia’s first oil field is estimated to produce only a “small fraction” of expected oil, according to an independent review, putting its developer, KrisEnergy, in further financial peril, the company said.
KrisEnergy has warned that its current production rate at Cambodia’s Apsara offshore oil block has yielded only around half the company’s projected peak rate, and it has extended debt repayment deadlines and brought in an engineering firm to assess the situation amid “material uncertainty … to continue as a going concern.”
KrisEnergy extracted the first drops of oil from Cambodia’s Block A, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced on Tuesday, achieving a decades-old goal despite the company’s ongoing financial woes.
While Cambodia has aspired to draw its first oil since deposits were discovered off the coast in 2004, an oil field licensee has missed another production deadline and now faces a global slowdown in oil and gas exploration.
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