Myanmar
A group led by Daewoo Corp., Seoul, spudded the Shwe-1 wildcat on the Rakhine basin shelf in the Bay of Bengal a few dozen kilometers south of southernmost Bangladesh.
Daewoo operates 4,000 sq km Block A-1 off Sittwe with South Korean and Indian partners.
Myanmar's energy ministry has estimated a resource of several dozen trillion cubic feet of gas in the nonproducing, lightly explored basin. Nearby Bangladesh and India are both hungry for natural gas.
Tertiary gas reservoirs are expected when drilling to 4,000 m in the Rakhine basin.
Only a few shallow, noncommercial oil accumulations have been found onshore in this part of the Arakan-Yoma coastal belt (OGJ, Jan. 19, 1987, p. 62).