Govt doubts idea of accelerated Cepu block development
Thursday, February 8 2007 - 01:59 PM WIB
Kardaya Warnika, the head of oil and gas upstream authority BP Migas, said on Thursday that the government wanted the firm and its partner PT Pertamina to produce up to 80,000 barrels per day at the block at the start of production, a target which is impossible to meet based on an accelerated development scenario.
The idea of accelerating the development of the block was voiced by ExxonMobil?s vice president for Asia Steven Greenlee on February 6 in Singapore, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
?We?ve been talking to the (Indonesian) government about this separate production,? which could come one to two years early, Greenlee was quoted by the agency.
He however did not specify how ExxonMobil would be able to speed up the production.
Kardaya noted that one option to make the acceleration of the Cepu development possible is using trucks to transport oil produced at Cepu. In this case, the companies need thousands of trucks, which will cause problems for the existing infrastructure in the area. Another option is using the pipeline owned by Pertamina and Chinese firm for oil produced at Sukowati field, which is close to Cepu. This, however, will enable ExxonMobil to produce up to 15,000 bpd , which is the capacity of the pipeline.
?We want more than that. The point is staging, We want (the block to) first (produce) 80,000 bpd than 170,000 bpd,? he said.
In order to produce such an amount, ExxonMobil said it and Pertamina had to build its own pipeline but the company noted that it was not easy to develop the pipeline due to land acquisition problems.
?ExxonMobil is very happy to use its own pipeline. But based on experience, it is no easy to build a pipeline due to land acquisition problems... Still we ask the firm to study the possibility of producing in 2009,? Kardaya said. (Godang)