Natural gas plant opens in Bogo City

The first natural gas power plant in Cebu was launched yesterday in barangay Libertad, Bogo City, north Cebu, with a generation capacity of one megawatt and a field life of five years.

The Libertad Natural Gas Power Plant generates 1,000 kilowatts of additional power in the grid to augment the supply distributed by Cebu Electric Cooperative Area 2.

“At present, the total power requirement in our area is 40 MW. This is a welcome addition especially since Bogo is a progressive city,” said Cebeco 2 director Randy Perez.

Cebeco 2 covers Tuburan town in the midwest to Daan Bantayan in the north and Compostela in the northeast.

The plant is the country’s third one for natural gas, and the second plant located onshore, said engineer Ledentor Pascual of the Department of Enery.

Bogo City Mayor Celestino E. Martinez, Jr. said the plant was a “dream come true” after many years of different explorers drilling in the area.

There were explorations made since 1950s. Two companies did some drilling but none of the projects came about until Forum Exploration Inc. came, said Mayor Martinez.

Forum Exploration Inc. partnered with DESCO Inc. to run the new natural gas power plant, which they project to produce enough gas to be converted into energy for the next five years.

“The gas field is producing about 240,000 cubic feet of 96 percent methane gas that fuels the DESCO power plant converting it to energy daily,” said Dan Carlos of Forum Exploration Inc.

Carlos said the company invested $11 million since they started drilling work in 1994.

However, the revenue from selling the generated power at P5.50 per kwh to Cebeco 2 is not enough to recover the investment in five years, said Carlos, so the company is exploring the surrounding areas for more natural gas sources.

“We have identified another area in barangay Marango, which is next to Libertad. I think we won’t need to build another plant there because we will be tapping the same structure here in Libertad. Other areas are in Toledo City and Daanbantayan town,” said Carlos.

If the one-megawatt plant runs smoothly, the company will add two units with 500-kilowatt capacity after six months to one year, he said.

The Cebu plant is the third natural gas plant in the country.

Nationwide, total generated power from natural gas is only around 2,200 megawatts. This is mostly from the Malampaya Deep Water Gas-to-Power project, which was commercialized in 1998 and some from the San Antonio gasfield in Isabela province which generates about 3 MW of power, said Pascual of DOE.

Based on data from the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), the Visayas has a system capacity of 1,731 MW with a peak demand of 1,326 MW and a reserve of 405 MW.

The generation mix in the Visayas is dominated by geothermal energy with 49.96 percent share of total power.

Coal follows closely with 44.29 percent. Other energy sources are biodiesel (0.1 percent), renewable energy biogas (0.87 percent), diesel (4.58 percent) and hydro (0.2 percent).