House questions difference in oil production data
Tuesday, September 23 2003 - 03:16 AM WIB
The daily reported that the data provided by BP Migas, the government’s agency in charge of the supervision of oil and gas exploration and production shows the country’s total oil production of 1.15 million barrels per day, or 65,800 barrels higher than 1.09 million barrels reported by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.
A member of the commission, Marle Sihaloho, later said that the difference occured because Caltex exchanged part of its oil production with gas from ConocoPihlips Indonesia to support the company’s activities to enhance oil production from old oil wells.
The swap has taken place since 1998 but BP Migas did not take it into account in its report. The government, under the swap agreement, will receive additional revenues from Conoco.
But Sihaloho said that the swap had resulted in uncertainty in the amount of revenue received by the government from the exchanged oil. “We don’t know whether the production split in the exchanged oil production was based on a 80:15 percent sharing contract as applied on oil production or 70:30 percent split based on gas production.
“Based on the available data the government received only US$56.9 million while Conoco received US$129.4 million. We don’t know which of the production split arrangements are used,” he said. (*)