ABSTRACT: The Changing Face of Indonesia's Petroleum Resources

Peter Cockcroft

The greatest potential for quickly developing petroleum resources for the expanding Indonesian economy in this new decade probably lies in the development of existing oil pools, while the longer term significance potential lies in domestic gas, geothermal, and coal utilization, as well as frontier oil and gas exploration.

The current trend of increasing population and domestic energy consumption indicates that Indonesia will become a net importer of petroleum by the end of the 1990s.

Possible remedies to reverse or decelerate this trend include:

-- further development in existing petroleum contract areas
-- new exploration contracts
-- development of alternative domestic fuels, e.g., gas, geothermal, coal
-- improved recovery of existing oil and gas fields

Unfortunately, some of these alternatives will not solve the immediate problem of declining petroleum production owing to these factors:

-- Development of existing contracts is becoming more difficult with decreasing field size and more complex geology.
-- Exploration success in new areas during the past 15 years has been disappointing, and the time needed to bring on production can be extremely long.
-- A form of deregulation of gas prices has helped the potential of the domestic gas market, but a complete pipeline complex is still not yet developed. Geothermal energy and coal utilization are still long-term projects as far as domestic use is concerned.

This paper suggests that the greatest potential lies in improved recovery of existing oil fields. It is believed that there is a technical potential of over 4 billion barrels of oil by the use of appropriate secondary and tertiary enhanced oil recovery methods from existing pools in Indonesia.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90097©1990 Fifth Circum-Pacific Energy and Mineral Resources Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, July 29-August 3, 1990