- Antara/ Aguk Sudarmojo
VIVAnews - Indonesia's oil and gas regulator BP Migas said the national demand on oil has now exceeded 1.2 million barrels per day. On the other hand, the domestic refineries can only produce 700 thousand barrels per day, causing the nation to import more oil.
"It's really inevitable [to import oil]," said a BP Migas official, Gde Pradnyana.
Pradnyana claimed the nation needs more sources of energy to shore up the economy amid growing difficulties of gaining oil supplies.
BP Migas has brought out attempts to boost the national oil production through which high oil-exploring level is recorded. The latest data shows that Indonesia has drilled oil eight times higher than those main oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Libya.
Indonesia has four million barrels of oil reserve with average oil production of one million barrels per day.
In contrast, Saudi Arabia only produces oil at an average rate of eight million barrels per day out of 265 billion barrels of oil reserve. Moreover, Libya generates 1.5 million barrels of oil per day out of 46 billion barrels of oil reserve.
Considerable amount of oil reserves has been commonly discovered in western Indonesia. Minas field, Duri, Riau, and Cepu, Central Java, are some of the examples.
However, today Minas only produces only 70 thousand barrels of oil per day, a huge fall compared to its production in mid 1970s of 250 thousand barrels of oil per day.
Nonetheless, Indonesia has targeted areas in eastern Indonesia as exploration sites from which more gas resources are found in enormous volume.
