Govt to revise CBM roadmap

The government plans to revise the national coal bed methane (CBM) roadmap in order to further drive the development of the fuel, according to the press release from the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) obtained on Thursday.

Hendra Fadly, Director of Oil and Gas Enterprise Supervision at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, said the new roadmap is needed because the existing roadmap has failed to reach its target. The existing roadmap targets 500 mmscfd of cbm output by 2015. However, until now, the production has reached only 1 mmscfd.

He said the new roadmap will be formulated based on the real conditions, challenges and opportunities faced in the CBM sector at present.

?The revision of the roadmap aims to help achieve the national energy mix targets,? he said on Wednesday during the IndoCBM conference in Jakarta.

Hendra acknowledged that CBM players are faced with many obstacles, including the lack of rig for CBM explorations. As a solution, the ministry, together with universities, will produce such rigs. Besides, an alternative contract system, that is Gross Production Contract will be introduced in order to drive C CBM explorations, he said, without elaborating the contract.

He said the government has signed 54 CBM PSCs. The country?s CBM resources are estimated at 453 tcf, mostly located in South Sumatra (184 tcf), Bario (101.6 tcf), Kutai 80.4 tcf, and Central Sumatra (52.2 tcf). Based on evaluation by Advanced Resources International Inc (ARI) in 2003, CBM resources amount to between 400-453 tcf, the sixth highest in the world.

Editing by Johannes Simbolon