The black gold discovery, said to be one of the major global discoveries this century, will boost the national oil and gas company's reserves as well as rekindle investor interest in the oil and gas sector.
AmResearch said Malaysia has 85 trillion cu ft of gas reserves with oil reserves at 5.8 billion barrels while the new discoveries could account for 3 per cent of the country's natural gas reserves and 2 per cent of its oil reserves.
"These new discoveries underpin our optimism for the industry, as (they) prolong the lifespan of Malaysian reserves - 24 years for crude oil and 38 years for natural gas," AmResearch said in a report early this week.
On Monday, Petronas gave Malaysians a pleasant surprise, when it announced fresh major discoveries from two wells that have the potential of producing both oil and gas.
Some 100 million barrels of oil and 2.8 trillion standard cubic feet (tscf) of natural gas were discovered from two exploration blocks there.
Petronas itself is not listed on the stock exchange but it has several units listed, among them Petronas Chemical Group Bhd and Petronas Dagangan Bhd.
The national oil company also contributes some RM75 billion annually to the federal government, which is equivalent to about 40 per cent of the country's revenue.
Other oil and gas firms that could be traded actively today are SapuraCrest Petroleum Bhd and Kencana Petroleum Bhd.
Both firms were awarded marginal oil and gas field projects by Petronas in late January. Malaysia has some 106 marginal oil fields containing 580 million barrels of oil.
Dialog Group, which is embarking on a RM5 billion deepwater petroleum terminal at Pengerang in Johor, could also see heavy trading today, on knee-jerk reaction to the latest deepwater discovery.
Malaysia is Southeast Asia's second largest oil and gas producing nation with Petronas reportedly armed with a RM40 billion capital expenditure war chest this year to help upgrade its infrastructure and find new sources of oil and gas.
These factors and the fresh discovery has made the oil and gas stocks, which were laggards in 2010, the standout performers so far this year.
Year-to-date, Dialog, SapuraCrest and Kencana were up 17.88 per cent, 14.52 per cent and 6.64 per cent, respectively.
On the converse, the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI has regressed 0.89 per cent in the same period. - By Rupinder Singh of Business Times.
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