The gas burning here comes from a patch of seabed that neither Vietnam nor Malaysia was ever willing to concede belonged solely to the other. The PM3 field lies in the overlapping area between the two countries' maritime claims — a zone where the sensible answer to an unresolved boundary was to stop arguing and start drilling together. From there an 18-inch steel pipeline runs 298 kilometres along the floor of the Gulf of Thailand, comes ashore at Mũi Tràm on the west coast of the Cà Mau Peninsula, and continues 27 kilometres inland to a river junction at Khánh An, in what used to be U Minh district. Everything that follows is what happens when you land two billion cubic metres of gas a year in a swamp.
Laying pipe across 298 kilometres of seabed is not the hard part; landing it here is. The Cà Mau coast has no bedrock, no deep-water approach, and a shoreline that moves. Vietsovpetro completed the line in February 2007 — 330 kilometres end to end, rated at two billion cubic metres of gas per year — and in doing so gave the far southwest of Vietnam something it had never had: a large, dependable energy input that did not have to be trucked or barged down National Route 1. The complex it feeds was designated one of three flagship national economic projects for the 2000–2005 period, and alongside the Cần Thơ Bridge it ranks among the largest works ever built in the Mekong Delta.
Two gas-fired thermal power plants stand at the site, with a combined capacity of 1,500 megawatts, their principal equipment supplied by Siemens and their construction handled by the Vietnamese engineering contractor LILAMA. Both entered service on 27 December 2008. The setting is genuinely incongruous. This is Khánh An, at the meeting of two rivers, on the margin of U Minh Hạ — a freshwater peat swamp of melaleuca where the ground is made of accumulated plant matter and where, within living memory, the local economy meant beekeeping, fishing and eels. Turbine halls and transmission gantries now rise out of that flatness, visible from a very long way off, because there is nothing else on the horizon to compete with them.
The third leg of the complex is the one that touches the most people. A urea plant on the site converts natural gas into nitrogen fertiliser at a rate of 800,000 metric tons a year, and that output goes largely where you would expect: onto the rice fields of the Mekong Delta, the region that feeds much of Vietnam and exports a great deal of the surplus. It closes a loop that is easy to miss from the air. The hydrocarbons under the Gulf of Thailand become nitrogen in the soil of Hậu Giang and An Giang, become rice, and become the reason the delta's yields no longer depend on how much silt the annual flood happens to deliver.
The gas processing plant, GPP Cà Mau, completed the complex. It handles 6.2 million cubic metres of gas a day — roughly the two billion cubic metres a year the pipeline was built to deliver — and strips out the heavier fractions the power plants and the urea unit do not need: about 600 tons of liquefied petroleum gas and 34 tons of condensate every day. The LPG goes into the cylinders that cook meals across southern Vietnam. On 5 June 2025 the plant passed one million tons of cumulative LPG production, a milestone that quantifies something otherwise invisible, which is how much of the region's domestic fuel now originates 300 kilometres offshore in disputed water.
A complex like this is not neutral where it stands. It occupies low wetland beside a national park, in a landscape whose water table, salinity and peat are all finely balanced and all already under pressure from subsidence and salt intrusion further south. The trade being made here is explicit rather than hidden: reliable power and domestic fertiliser for a province that historically had neither, set against industrial footprint in one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the delta. Cà Mau spent most of its recorded history as the part of Vietnam that development did not reach. The gas complex is the most concrete evidence available that this is no longer true.
The complex sits at approximately 9.24°N, 105.06°E, at Khánh An about 20 km northwest of Cà Mau city, at the junction of two rivers on the southern edge of the U Minh Hạ peat forest. It is the single most conspicuous man-made structure on this part of the peninsula: from 3,000–7,000 feet look for turbine halls, storage spheres, a stack, and radiating high-voltage transmission lines cutting straight lines across otherwise chaotic canal country — the transmission corridors are visible well before the plant itself. The 27-kilometre onshore pipeline runs northwest toward the Mũi Tràm landfall on the Gulf coast. Cà Mau Airport (VVCM / CAH) lies roughly 12 nm southeast with a 1,500-metre runway 09/27. Expect industrial haze near the site and, in the February-to-April dry season, smoke from peat and stubble fires in the surrounding forest that can markedly reduce slant visibility.