By IANS,
Seoul : South Korea plans to invest nearly $12 billion in oil and natural gas developments next year in a bid to secure stable energy supply, the economy ministry said Wednesday.
The nation’s public corporations would invest $7.8 billion in developing oil and natural gas resources in 2012, while private-sector enterprises were set to spend $4 billion in energy projects, according the ministry of knowledge economy.
Next year’s investment was up 34 percent from $8.8 billion estimated for this year, and would be the largest annual amount for energy projects, Xinhua cited the ministry as saying.
The largest-ever investment would be made as part of efforts to secure stable energy supply for the world’s fifth-largest crude oil importer and the second-biggest liquefied natural gas (LNG) buyer.
The ministry aimed to raise the country’s energy self-sufficiency ratio for both oil and gas to 20 percent by the end of 2012, while the state-run Korea National Oil Corp. (KNOC) planned to secure oil reserves of around 2 billion barrels and produce as much as 300,000 barrels per day by the end of next year.