EVERY time a tanker navigates the Strait of Hormuz, Southeast Asia holds its breath.
The region’s dependence on Middle Eastern crude is not merely an economic inconvenience; it is a structural vulnerability baked into decades of energy policy. Asean member states collectively import a significant share of their oil from the Gulf, threading their industrial lifelines through one of the world’s most geopolitically volatile chokepoints. The war in Ukraine rattled global energy markets. Tensions in the Middle East have repeatedly spiked crude prices overnight. For a region as dynamic and fast-growing as Southeast Asia, this exposure is no longer acceptable.
The answer is not to sever ties with Gulf producers. It is to build something of our own, an Asean common infrastructure.
Asean sits atop considerable hydrocarbon wealth. The South China Sea alone is estimated to hold billions of barrels of oil and vast reserves of natural gas. Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Myanmar each hold proven reserves. Yet these resources are developed in isolation, national projects, national pipelines, national storage, national ambition. The region extracts and exports separately, then turns around and imports collectively from thousands of miles away. This is the central paradox that a regional oil and gas framework must resolve.
A coordinated Asean energy architecture, encompassing shared exploration ventures, jointly operated refineries, regional strategic petroleum reserves, and interconnected pipeline networks, would transform the region’s energy posture from fragile to formidable. It would reduce exposure to Middle Eastern supply disruptions, lower per-unit infrastructure costs through pooled investment, and create a genuine community of energy security that mirrors Asean’s broader political aspirations. The European Union’s energy market integration, however imperfect, demonstrated that sovereign nations with divergent interests can build shared infrastructure when the strategic case is compelling enough. For Asean, that case has never been more compelling.
The obvious objection is territorial. Asean member states carry unresolved maritime disputes, overlapping exclusive economic zones, and deep-seated national sensitivities about resource sovereignty. The South China Sea remains a flashpoint where legal ambiguity meets geopolitical rivalry. How, critics will ask, can nations that cannot agree on where their waters end build refineries together? The answer lies in reframing the question.
Territorial disputes are fundamentally about ownership. A regional energy framework is fundamentally about shared benefit. These are not the same conversation, and history shows they need not block each other. Joint development zones, already established between Malaysia and Thailand in the Gulf of Thailand, and between Australia and Timor-Leste in the Timor Sea, demonstrate that nations can agree to develop resources cooperatively while leaving underlying sovereignty questions deliberately unresolved. The arrangement does not concede a centimeter of claimed territory. It simply recognizes that a shared refinery produces more value than an empty seabed.
Asean’s political compact has always been built on pragmatic consensus over ideological rigidity. That same spirit of practical cooperation, which has kept a diverse 10-nation bloc together for more than five decades, must now be applied to the energy domain. The differences in territorial borders should not stop the shared commitment to build what the region urgently needs.
Few Asean members are better geographically positioned to anchor a regional energy framework than the Philippines, and few have left more potential untapped. The country sits at the crossroads of four distinct hydrocarbon frontiers, each carrying its own strategic weight. In the West Philippine Sea, where Manila’s sovereign rights were affirmed by the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling, substantial natural gas and oil deposits await development that have been long delayed by geopolitical friction with China. Breaking that impasse, whether through firm assertion of sovereign rights or carefully structured joint development arrangements, is not merely a national interest; it is a regional one. Eastward, the Benham Rise, formally renamed the Philippine Rise, sits within Manila’s extended continental shelf in the Philippine Sea and has drawn scientific attention for its potential subsurface resources, representing an unexplored frontier that could redefine the country’s energy calculus. In the south, the Sulu Sea and the waters flanking southern Mindanao toward the Indonesian border sit astride one of the most hydrocarbon-rich maritime corridors in Southeast Asia, geologically continuous with the productive Celebes Sea basin that Indonesia has long exploited to the south. Developing these southern fields in coordination with Indonesia, mirroring the joint development zone model, would not only unlock shared reserves but strengthen the economic scaffolding of a subregion long defined by instability. The Philippines need not wait for every territorial question to be settled before it acts. What it needs is a coherent national energy development strategy that treats these four maritime zones as complementary pillars of a unified resource architecture, and that positions Manila as a confident, constructive contributor to Asean’s collective energy future rather than a passive bystander to it.
If the political will can be assembled, the next critical question is where to build. Facility siting cannot be decided by political horse-trading alone; it must be anchored in long-term regional demand forecasting.
Asean’s energy consumption is projected to rise sharply through 2040, driven by urbanization, manufacturing expansion, and a growing middle class across Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Any regional facility, whether a deepwater terminal, a joint refinery, or a strategic storage hub, must be positioned to serve this emerging demand geography, not the demand geography of 20 years ago.
This points toward Indonesia’s western archipelago and the Malacca Strait corridor as natural candidates for major processing and storage infrastructure, given their proximity to both the Strait of Malacca shipping lane and the largest consumer populations in the region. Vietnam’s central coast offers strategic value for the northeastern Asean market. A distributed model, multiple medium-scale facilities linked by pipeline and maritime connections rather than one mega-facility, would also provide redundancy, ensuring that no single point of failure can paralyze regional supply.
Critically, these facilities must be designed from inception for a mixed-energy future. As Asean transitions toward cleaner energy sources over the coming decades, regional infrastructure must be capable of handling liquefied natural gas and hydrogen alongside conventional crude, ensuring the investment is still relevant across energy transition timelines.
Energy security is, at its core, a statement of collective identity. Nations that share supply chains share fates. An Asean that refines its own oil, stores its own reserves, and manages its own supply disruptions is an Asean that has moved from a trade bloc to a genuine community — one that does not wait for distant powers to determine whether its factories run and its lights stay on.
The Middle East will remain a supplier. Diversification is not decoupling. But resilience demands that Southeast Asia stop outsourcing its energy security to a region it cannot control, across a passage it cannot protect.
The resources are beneath us. The ability exists among us. What remains is the political courage to build together what none of us can build alone. That is the Asean way. The time for that courage is now.