NOV NOV Inc

   By Justina Lee 
 

Upstream oil-and-gas company KrisEnergy Ltd. (SK3.SG) said Wednesday that it had signed a deal with Profab Indonesia to build a wellhead platform for the Apsara offshore oil field, Cambodia's first oil development.

Profab, a subsidiary of Houston-based National Oilwell Varco (NOV), will build the platform at its facility in Batam, Indonesia, KrisEnergy said in a press release. It didn't disclose financial details of the deal.

The Apsara oil field is Cambodia's maiden oil development and lies in the Khmer Basin, an unproduced reserve in Cambodian waters of the Gulf of Thailand. Production will begin in the first half of 2020 and is expected to eventually yield as much as 7,500 barrels of oil a day, KrisEnergy said.

Cambodia has sought for years to develop the Apsara deposit. U.S. oil major Chevron Corp. (CVX) discovered oil and gas reserves at Apsara in 2004, but exited the Southeast Asian nation a decade later without moving to the production stage. It sold interests in the field to KrisEnergy.

The news comes as cash-strapped KrisEnergy has been working on plans to restructure hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and this week faces the end of a three-month period of court protection from creditors.

KrisEnergy recently sold off an interest in an Indonesian offshore project and said it intends to focus its financial resources on improving operations at fields in Bangladesh and the Gulf of Thailand while also developing the Cambodian project.

Shares of KrisEnergy haven't traded since August.

Write to Justina Lee at justina.lee@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 13, 2019 00:55 ET (05:55 GMT)

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