JakartaPost-Jan 6, 2025
President Prabowo Subianto has vowed to boost oil and gas production in the country as part of his self-sufficiency drive, but experts and businesses foresee big impediments to achieving that goal. Prabowo aims to limit Indonesia’s dependence on imported fuel by offering dozens of new oil and gas blocks to investors in the coming years. His administration also plans to reactivate idle oil wells across the country to reduce costly oil shipments from overseas, according to the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry. “We are pushing for even more oil and gas exploration as well as for other minerals. Ladies and gentlemen, Indonesia is open for business,” Prabowo told an audience at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Lima on Nov. 14. The government hopes to bring back that peak performance by the end of 2030. But the country lifted just 571,700 bopd this year as of November, down from 779,000 bopd in 2015, according to data from the Finance Ministry and Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry. Indonesia, which has been a net oil importer for years, procured 132.4 million barrels from abroad last year, up 26 percent from the previous year, energy ministry data shows. Similarly, the country only lifted 960,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) of natural gas in the year to November, down from 1.2 million boepd a decade ago, according to the same data. In July, the government said it was considering whether to allow imports of liquified natural gas (LNG) for industrial areas to bring down the domestic gas price, but no decision has yet been made. Moshe Rizal, who heads the investment committee of the Association of Oil and Gas Companies (Aspermigas), estimated that around 70 percent of oil production was controlled by state-owned oil and gas company Pertamina, while natural gas production was mostly operated by private contractors (K3S). Read more at:
