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Manila Bulletin, March 2, 2002
Bomasang: Energy official was once turned down from
janitorial job
By CECILIA QUIAMBAO
MANILA - Growing up as a boy in the Cordilleras shortly after World War
II, Rufino Bomasang recalls trudging along mountain trails at night, his
back bent under a heavy load of firewood and navigating the darkness with a
burning branch of pine.
Not even in his wildest dreams did the son of a poor Kankana-ey farmer
imagine that he would one day become one of the stalwarts of the energy
industry of his generation.
In fact, he was turned down twice when he applied for his first adult
job, as a janitor.
“I never thought that electricity would ever be available in Besao,” the
61 year-old president of PNOC-Exploration Corp. said of his remote hometown in
the Mountain Province.
“Much less did I even dream that I would one day be president of a
company with the primary mission of assuring the country adequate energy
supply.”
But had the Teachers Camp of Baguio not rejected his job application, who knows
where fate would have taken the stocky, bushy-browed young man with an
ever-ready smile. He finally became a houseboy to a Baguio doctor when he was in
high school.
Bomasang’s long career in the energy industry began in 1976 when he left the
mining sector to join the team of then Energy Secretary Geronimo
Velasco, who had the daunting task of developing indigenous energy sources after
the shock of the first oil crisis. Velasco wanted somebody with an extensive
mining background to develop from scratch the country’s coal resources.
“Boomy” became the coal and uranium division chief of the then Bureau of Energy
Development in 1977, while being seconded as a senior manager of Petrophil
Corp., the precursor to the Filipino oil refiner Petron Corp.
During his years in the business, he became known throughout Southeast Asia as
the country’s foremost expert on coal. He traveled extensively around the world
to learn from mature industries in other countries. His work helped in the
development of Semirara Coal Corp., the only major coal mine in the Philippines
today.
In 1986 he became president of PNOC Coal Corp., and as the country reeled
through an energy crisis several years after the downfall of the Ferdinand
Marcos regime, he was named acting head of the presidential Office of Energy
Affairs, the precursor to the new Energy Department. When the new energy act
came to law in 1992, he was named undersecretary of energy under Delfin Lazaro.
“He is a person who is always pleasant,” recalls Lazaro, now president
and chief executive of i-Ayala. “The most important thing is, you can depend on
his honesty.”
As president of PNOC-EC, Bomasang’s signature achievement was to convince the
Royal Dutch/Shell Group to sell to his company a 10 percent stake in the
Malampaya natural gas to power project, the single largest investment in
Philippine history.
His company is also a joint venture partner in the country’s next
possible gas discovery, the Victoria, Tarlac prospect announced by President
Gloria Arroyo recently, and runs a small power plant fueled by gas from the
country’s first gas discovery in Isabela province.
“In the immediate future, I hope to continue making a meaningful
contribution to the country’s march toward energy self-reliance through the
implementation of various projects that PNOC-EC has initiated,” he said.
Though he was valedictorian of his elementary school in 1953 and a
salutatorian in high school, Bomasang faced a dead end when his parents
could no longer afford to send him to college. The University of the
Philippines took him in on a scholarship program for national minorities,
during which he met a quiet Muslim and fellow minority scholar named Nur
Misuari.
Bomasang obtained a mining engineer’s degree, and topped the board
examination in 1964. But he eschewed prestige jobs at established mines like
Lepanto, Philex, Atlas and Benguet, choosing instead to work as shift
manager of a Proctor and Gamble oil mill in Tondo.
There were limited career opportunities for Filipinos in mining prior to
the repeal of parity rights in the 1970s, he explained. Americans owned many of
the mines, and foreigners held most of the senior positions.
“Filipino mining engineers were bring discriminated against in their own
country at that time. We could only reach a certain level,” he said.
A former professor finally convinced him to join the mining sector in
1964, as mill superintendent of a mercury operation, the Palawan Quicksilver
Mine. Its owner, Marsman and Co., was then in the process of “Filipinizing” its
operations, he said.
When Bomasang flew to Palawan to take the job, it was his first ever
plane ride. He wondered if there was a dress code, so he donned a coat and tie.
But was the only one with such an outfit in the plane.
He also mistook his future boss, Feliciano Adorable, for a baggage hand. When
Adorable told him he led the Marsman operation there, Bomasang sheepishly
removed his coat.
It was in Palawan that he met his future wife Madelene, a schoolteacher.
They got married in 1970 and had two daughters. The first is now a
successful doctor, and the second, holder of a master’s degree in public
policy at a prestigious Japanese university, now works with a consulting
firm in the United States.
Bomasang, who later joined Itogon-Suyoc Mines in Benguet in 1967,
remarked that most people in his profession tended to marry only two kinds of
women, either medical workers or teachers.
“When you work in a remote place, your choice is limited to either the
company nurse or teachers at a nearby school,” he joked.
But
the marriage broke his father’s heart - the family was eyeing an
arranged marriage with a Besao nurse, whose name would later became
synonymous with Cordillera garments and handicrafts. Dad complained that he had
wed a “mere lowlander”.
But his wife’s kin also complained, he recounts lightheartedly. Her
grandmother grumbled that she married an Igorot, he said.
By the early 1980s, Bomasang’s name was a byword in the Asian coal
industry, “coal boy” in industry parlance. Recently, Graeme Robertson, the
president of Adaro, Indonesia’s largest coalmine, said he has played tennis with
Boomy.
Chanin Vongkusolkit, chief executive of the largest coal company in
Thailand, tells the Manila Bulletin that Bomasang is an old acquaintance.
The face of Ambyo Mangunwidjaya, a respected mining engineering professor in
Indonesia, lights up at the mention of Boomy’s name.
Bomasang loves to recount that through his travels, he had acquired
“royal blood” after receiving blood transfusion following an aspirin
complication during a recent trip to Brunei.
Looking ahead, Bomasang said he intends to use his expertise and his
extensive international network in the energy sector “to help my fellow
Cordillerans, particularly in the alleviation of poverty.”
“More specifically, I would like to focus on the development of the
Cordillera’s vast renewable energy resources to serve as the springboard for the
sustainable development of the Cordillera provinces, which remain among the
country’s 18 poorest.” End
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