Govt prepares two regulations to boost oil production

The government is preparing two regulations to support efforts in ramping up national oil and gas production, said Evita Legowo, Director General for Oil and Gas at the energy ministry.

She said one regulation is in the form of presidential instruction (Inpres) on oil production increase and the other one will be ministerial decree on EOR (enhanced oil recovery).

He said the presidential instruction will regulate a number of issues such as improved coordination and speeding up the process in resolving problems aiming at boosting oil and gas production.

The ministerial decree will regulate incentives to be given to companies planning to apply enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

The plan is part of the government efforts to prevent natural declining of oil production. The government sees that oil and gas will remain an important source of energy over the next twenty years, contributing at least 20 percent to the energy mixed consumed by the nation. The government is hoping to drive up the oil production to above 1 million barrels of oil over the next wo years from just above 900,000 barrels per day at present.

Meanwhile, the head of the upstream oil and gas regulator BPMIGAS, Raden Priyono said oil and gas production sharing contractors (PSC) will be obliged to include improved oil recovery (IOR) plan in their Work Program and Budget (WP&B) and Plan of Development (Pod), beginning 2012.

The policy is part of efforts to optimize oil and gas production, Priyono said during a discussion in Jakarta Wednesday.

?Indonesia has remaining oil reserves of 3.7 billion which will deplete in next 12 years. However, oil potentials (including secondary and tertiary reserves) reach 43.7 billion barrels, which has not been upgraded,? he said.

Deputy Chairman for Planning of BPMIGAS, Haposan Napitupulu said currently Indonesia has 275 working areas (WK) of oil and gas. About 60 percent of which are primary fields, 20 percent are WKs that have secondary reserves and 20 percent WKs have tertiary reserves category.

He said the IOR and EOR technologies will enable oil and gas companies to produce oil and gas from secondary reserves category. They can use chemical injection in their EOR program, CO2, polymer or steam injection. (giok)