Phinma group’s, Trans-Asia Oil and Energy Development Corp are actively looking for partners in their wind power projects around the country. The company’s president and CEO, Francisco Viray, said that they plan to put up about 400 megawatts (MW) of wind power projects from 38 sites in the Visayas and Luzon islands of the country

They are calculating that for each MW of power produced, it will require about $2.5 Million in capital. This would require them to seek for financial assistance from a partner.
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The US government has announced that they will start clamping down on Oil future traders who don’t actually use oil as a main component of their daily operations. These are mainly the banks and other investment funds. The US had already announced that they were going after the culprits responsible for artificially inflating the price of oil.

Some of the proposals that cropped up on how to prevent speculation in oil futures trading were to set stricter limits on the amount of contracts people are allowed to trade, increasing the amount of their own money that they have to put up to buy the contracts, as well as better reporting on who is buying what.
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President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil is lobbying Congress for reforms in their Oil policy to enable government to have a more direct stake in the oil being extracted from its oil fields. Recently Brazil had been the site of a recently discovered oil field that is projected to contain more oil than its oil exporting neighbors.

The new system that the President is pulling for is one wherein the government would own a part of all oil produced. The current system has companies bidding to win the rights to explore for oil in blocks.
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The Reed Bank is an area west of Palawan and within the Philippines 320 km exclusive economic zone but its ownership however is disputed by the countries of China and Vietnam. Exploration of the Reed Bank has shown that it could contain about 3.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 440 million barrels of oil. The area is much closer to the Philippine island of Palawan compared to the even hotly contested Kalayaan Island Group of the Spratlys.

Plans raised for the Philippines to mine the area of its energy minerals has resulted in China announcing its objection to the idea. Chinese Ambassador Liu Jianchao said yesterday that the plan is a violation of Chinese sovereignty, but he is confident that the matter can be settled through negotiations. He also said that unilateral economic activity is not allowed in areas subject of a territorial dispute.
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I chanced upon this article at the KPMG corner which touched on the topic of Oil Exploration in the Philippines, the author, Fernando Hernandez , pointed out that the Philippines potential for oil has not been really investigated, despite the fact that we have sedimentary basins located near oil rich territories of Indonesia, Malaysia and China. These can be found in 16 sedimentary basins covering an area of 700,000 sq km.

Since the start of oil exploration in the Philippines about a decade ago, 557 wells have been drilled with only 17 wells ever having commercially produced oil. Of those 17, only 4 wells are still pumping oil. Compare this to our neighbor, Indonesia, who drills about 400 wells a year. The Philippines drilling rate can be pegged at 1.6 wells per 1,000 square kilometers, compare this to the United States which drills about 1 well per 25 square kilometers.
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CBSNews reports that the US government is making moves to stop oil speculation. According to the report, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is working on regulating oil speculators by setting limits on the amount of oil that they can hold and how long it can be held. Aside from that they are working to improve transparency in the process so it can be easily seen who is speculating.

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