Oil and gas production increase: Monitoring team report

Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Darwin Zahedy Saleh has received a report from the Oil and Gas Production Increase Monitoring Team (TP3M), which says national oil and gas production is on the rise after maintenance work on production facilities of production sharing contractors were completed in July 2011.

As of Aug. 22, 2011, average production that month is recorded as the highest this year with 913,000 barrels of oil per day and 9,068 MMSCFD of gas. National oil production averaged 905,000 bpod and gas production averaged 8,418 MMSCFD. To further boost production, TP3M recommended that permit issuance and land clearing for drilling work, extra rig procurement, equipment and production facilities, settlement of oil transportation, upside potential drilling and waterflood plan implementation be precipitated.

TP3M added that WP&B 2011 for drilling of 490 development wells as of July 2011 across the country materialized albeit with mixed achievements. Drilling work in several fields with potentially huge production increase failed to meet the target. Realization of drilling of exploration wells reached 58 both in exploration and production fields or 33 percent of the WP&B 2011.

Challenges facing the contractors include slow permit issuance, overlapping concessions, technical operational problems and availability of data and equipment, as well as contractors? managerial skills.

Particularly in development wells, new field discoveries were rare, forcing contractors to drill mostly in mature fields that require complicated reservoir management.

To increase drilling in production and development wells, TP3M recommended that licensing procedure, rig procurement strategy improvement, understanding of reservoir performance and characteristics, improvement of availability and quality of subsurface data, and enhancement of development and exploration supervision need to be accelerated. (josef)