On 28 May the National Assembly’s 9th Commission, led by Nin Saphon, sat with a Ministry of Mines and Energy delegation under Keo Rottanak to review the country’s energy strategy across the mining, electricity and petroleum sectors, work the commission described as a basis for the National Assembly to prepare and adopt future laws. The session ran through the National Energy Efficiency Policy for 2022 to 2030, the National Policy on Mineral Resources for 2018 to 2028, rural grid extension, the affordability of supply, and a net-zero ambition. A day earlier, Keo Rottanak had used a Reuters interview to press the case for tapping a contested offshore gas prospect, telling the agency that compulsory conciliation under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was “the only possible avenue to sort out differences in a peaceful and amicable manner” with Thailand, after Bangkok terminated the 2001 memorandum that had governed joint exploration. The reporting valued the prospect at $300 billion. Behind both sat the same pressure, an oil shock running out of the conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz that has squeezed regional fuel supply since early in the year.
Installed generation capacity reached 5,932 megawatts last year, up 14.4 percent from 5,183, and the ministry puts the renewable-energy share at 63 percent in 2025 against a target of 70 percent by 2030, one the minister himself set publicly in 2024, the year after he moved from running the state utility to running the ministry. What flows through the grid is a separate measure the official account did not draw out. In 2024, coal supplied more than 41 percent of Cambodia’s electricity and net imports close to 27 percent of consumption, the two largest shares, with hydropower near a quarter and solar under 5 percent, on figures compiled from EIA, Ember and IEA data. The renewable share the ministry names and the coal-and-import majority of the electricity the country actually generated in 2024 are two different statements about the same system.
The commission’s petroleum language reached “the exploration and reopening of oil wells” without naming a field, and Cambodia has drilled only one. The Apsara field in Block A, brought online by Singapore’s KrisEnergy in late 2020 as the country’s first offshore oil production, produced far below forecast, around 2,500 barrels a day against a projected 7,500 on industry trade coverage at the time, and lasted months; the operator filed for liquidation in June 2021, five days before the government’s planned celebration of first oil. A hired tanker then sailed from the field with about 300,000 barrels aboard, was seized off Indonesia, and Cambodia eventually recovered some $14 million on the cargo, according to later reporting. No investor has taken up the 3,083-square-kilometre block since.
The second prospect is the one the reporting valued in the billions. The Overlapping Claims Area covers roughly 27,000 square kilometres of the Gulf of Thailand and is estimated to hold around 11 trillion cubic feet of gas alongside oil and condensate, on figures traced to Thailand’s own Department of Mineral Fuels. The dispute runs to the 1970s, when Cambodia drew the western boundary in 1972 and Thailand the eastern one a year later. The $300 billion attached to the area is neither a Cambodian valuation nor an independent one. It originated with Thailand’s former energy minister, Pichai Naripthaphan, who put the area’s resources at 10 trillion baht, and it has circulated on both sides of the border since 2024, the figure the current reporting carries forward.
The path to that field narrowed in May. Thailand’s termination of the 2001 memorandum removed the bilateral framework for joint development, and the minister told Reuters that conciliation under UNCLOS was now the route, with Cambodia planning to approach the Thai side on the mechanism; Thailand’s foreign ministry said it would weigh suitable options under the UN conventions but wanted bilateral talks first. Both states are parties to the convention. Conciliation produces a recommendation rather than a binding award, which leaves the timeline for any gas long and uncertain even if the process opens.
While the offshore gas waits on conciliation, the near-term grid leans on power bought across borders, and parliament moved on that first. On 13 May the National Assembly approved a law guaranteeing the government’s payments to Vietnam Electricity, a four-year arrangement running from April 2026 to April 2030 that requires Cambodia to issue a fresh guarantee letter to the Vietnamese utility by 30 July. Contracted imports from Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have run near a quarter of the power supplied to the country, and the guarantee secures the Vietnamese share of it.
Thailand and Vietnam together supplied more than 60 percent of Cambodia’s petroleum-product imports in 2024, Singapore and Malaysia nearly a third, China around 7 percent, on UN-WTO trade data carried in the same reporting; the country has no refinery and holds less than a month of fuel under normal conditions. Thailand banned fuel exports to Cambodia in July 2025 after last year’s border fighting between the two countries and has not resumed them, and the Hormuz disruption closed about a third of the country’s petrol stations at the peak of the squeeze before most reopened, the same account records. The government has committed to building no new coal plants and is widening imports from Singapore and Malaysia, the conduct of a state managing a shortage rather than denying one.
The strategy under review meets a real exposure with real instruments, a capacity build, import contracts, a payment guarantee and a legal route to contested gas. The gaps it leaves open are the ones the documents themselves record: between the renewable share the ministry names and the coal-and-import current that still carries most of the load, and between a $300 billion figure first spoken in Bangkok and the single offshore field Cambodia has drilled, which stopped producing four years ago and has drawn no one back since.
