_ With natural gas destined to replace coal as its fuel of choice, Southeast Asia is unabashedly expanding its oil and gas industry to meet the skyrocketing energy demands of a booming population and unprecedented economic growth. Investments in regional hydrocarbon projects through 2029—particularly those in natural gas production—are forecast to exceed 4% compound annual growth rates with the spotlight on the region’s top two petroleum producers, Indonesia and Malaysia, according to the London-based Energy Council, a global network of senior energy finance executives. Norway’s Rystad Energy predicts that final investment decisions (FIDs) will be made between now and 2028 on $100 billion in new projects in the region, twice the $45 billion in FIDs taken from 2014 to 2023. These will include deepwater projects to develop new discoveries in Indonesia and Malaysia, and projects to create a global hub for carbon capture and storage (CCS) such as the one under study by Malaysian state-owned Petronas and Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC. The Malay Archipelago (also called the East Indies) is the world’s largest island group, and depending on the methodology of the geographer, it encompasses the 17,508 islands of Indonesia—literally the world’s largest country comprised of islands—and the approximately 7,000 islands of the Philippines. Indonesia and the Philippines in turn are among the 11 countries that constitute Southeast Asia after adding in Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—all with widely diverse histories, cultures, and religions. But all with one thing in common: a colonial past forged by adventurers from across Europe who in the 19th century arrived on their shores to extract natural resources to feed the Industrial Revolution at home. In the case of the earliest industrial oil production in Dutch Indonesia and British Malaysia, those adventurers, over multiple generations, added Southeast Asia to the US and Azerbaijan as cornerstones of the modern oil industry while also breaking John D. Rockefeller’s monopoly of the Asian oil trade by building the first tanker to traverse the Suez Canal. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century two of these industrialists, one Dutch and one British, merged their companies to create what is today’s energy supermajor known as Shell. First Oil Launches Dutch East Indies Production Boom The history of oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia dates back over centuries with tales of a cottage industry of hand-dug wells to comb petroleum seeps for medicine, to waterproof boats, and to light torches and lamps. As the Industrial Revolution dawned, the Russian czar financed the world’s first mechanically drilled oil well in 1846 in Baku using cable-tool percussion drilling to carve out a 21-m-deep (69-ft) exploration well. In 1859, Edwin Drake added steam-engine power to a mechanical drill to produce the US’ first industrial class oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
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