First Gen budgets $1.27b for 2024 capital spending

By Alena Mae S. Flores – May 31, 2024, 7:55 pm
from manilastandard.net

First Gen Corp. chairman and chief executive Federico Lopez (left) and president and chief operating officer Francis Giles Puno answer questions from the media during the company’s annual stockholders meeting on May 31, 2024 at The Fifth inside the Rockwell Mall in Makati City. Alena Mae S. Flores

First Gen Corp. of the Lopez Group is allocating $1.27 billion for 2024 capital expenditures (capex), with the bulk going to its geothermal unit Energy Development Corp. (EDC), an executive said Friday.

First Gen executive vice president and chief finance officer and treasurer Emmanuel Antonio Singson said $670 million would be allocated for EDC, $525 million for the acquisition of the 165-megawatt Casecnan hydro power plant and the balance for the completion of interim offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) and gas projects.

First Gen subsidiary Fresh River Lakes Corp. won the bid for the Casecnan hydro power plant.

“For Casecnan, we already secured financing, so we were already able to pay it. I think EDC also issued some green bonds to be able to finance the rigs…I think most of the fund-raising initiatives will be at the EDC level, because as I mentioned they are the ones that has a big capex of about $670 million,” Singson said during the company’s annual stockholders meeting.

Meanwhile, First Gen is set to bring to commercial operation seven new power facilities with a total capacity of 83 megawatts (MW) by the end of the year.

First Gen president and chief operating officer Francis Giles Puno said the seven power projects are being developed by EDC.

These include four geothermal power plants with a combined capacity of 82.6 megawatts and three battery energy storage system (BESS) projects with 40 megawatt-hours of total capacity.

Puno said the new geothermal projects would require P24 billion in investments, while the BESS projects would require P5.3 billion, for a total of P29.3 billion.

The bulk of the funding is coming from the P60 billion that the EDC set aside for its capital expenditure (capex) program last year.

“We completed the 29-MW binary plant–Palayan, and it just started operating right when there’s a need for supply. That’s new capacity that’s coming in,” said Puno,

“We continue to invest. Half of the P60-billion capex goes to drilling, the other half goes to new builds. Geothermal is complicated, you have to build new wells and then work over existing wells,” he said.

The P6.7-billion Palayan geothermal plant, one of the seven new power projects of the Lopez-owned firm, is located inside EDC’s Bacon-Manito (BacMan) geothermal facility in Bicol.

Meanwhile, the P2.9-billion, 5.6-MW geothermal power plant in Bago City, Negros Occidental is set to commence operations by the third quarter this year.

Two other geothermal power projects — the P6.6-billion, 20-MW Tanawon power plant also located in BacMan and the P7.8-billion, 28-MW Mahanagdong plant in EDC’s existing Leyte facilities — will begin operating by the fourth quarter of 2024.