A snapshot of Malaysia’s energy picture

Malaysia’s Suruhanjaya Tenaga (Energy Commission) releases an annual handbook containing energy statistics.  The latest version, released in 2014, contains data on energy consumption up to 2012.  This can be found here.  This post aims to distill some of the key energy stats from this handbook.

As can be seen below, most of Malaysia’s energy needs are met through fossil fuels.  Malaysia has vast natural gas reserves, and this has resulted in natural gas reliance increasing from 39% to 46% of primary energy supply since 1992, and from 8% to 22% of final energy consumption in the same period.  Crude oil primary supply has decreased, from 52% to 32% over this period, while coal has increased from 6% to 19%.  Hydro has stayed fairly constant at 3%.  However, overall primary energy supply (and final energy consumption) has nearly tripled in this same period, meaning that, while some fuel sources may have decreased proportionally, the supply of all fuels has increased individually.

Most energy is consumed by industry and transportation.  Over 44% of the primary energy supply is consumed in the in energy transformation, largely through refining and transformation of natural gas to LNG and from crude oil into petroleum products, and in the generation of electricity.

 

In terms of electricity production, again, natural gas and coal make up the majority of the fuel sources, from an installed capacity and electricity generation point of view.

Nearly 60% of all electricity is generated by IPP’s.  30% comes from the three utilities, TNB, SEB and SESB.  The rest is from co-generation, self generation or from the Small Renewable Energy Power (SREP) programme or from Feed in Tariffs (see post on this here).

 

 

There seem to be plans underway to export electricity to Indonesia and a 230MW transmission line is under construction to enable this.  Last reports on this that I can find date back to 2013, and the Sarawak Energy utility only has reports from 2010.  I can’t find any information on Malaysia exporting electricity, and assume that this is not yet taking place.  They are, however, a large exporter of natural gas and natural gas refined products.