Why Tiny Timor-Leste Is Defying Global Energy Giants

When Timor-Leste became a country in 2002, it did so with a built-in advantage: the Bayu-Undan oil and gas field. It’s generated billions of dollars that helped develop the Southeast Asian country’s infrastructure, but it hasn’t brought much in the way of jobs for Timor-Leste’s 1.2 million people. The government in Dili is looking to change that as it turns to developing a new field, with grand plans that include an oil refinery and petrochemical complex to maximize employment and boost exports. A three-kilometer (two-mile) deep gulch in the ocean floor has scared off some global oil giants. The country is out recruiting potential new partners, including some from China.

It involves the Greater Sunrise fields, which lie between Timor-Leste and Australia and are estimated to hold more than 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 200 million barrels of a light crude oil known as condensate. Discovered in 1974, development was delayed for decades by maritime boundary disputes that were resolved last year. The Timor-Leste government wants to use gas from those fields to underpin a new $12 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant as part of the industrial complex, called Tasi Mane, to be built over the next decade or so along the southern coast.