Indonesia has offered five onshore and offshore oil and gas blocks in its first tender for the year amid efforts to reverse an extended production decline.
Indonesia used to be a net oil exporter but this has changed as natural depletion and insufficient new exploration have combined to push its output of hydrocarbons down. As a result, the rate of oil production has been declining, at an average annual rate of 11%, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration.
"To meet oil and gas demand, Indonesia is currently focusing its efforts on exploring oil and gas basins considering that Indonesia still holds abundant untapped oil and gas reserves," the country’s energy minister Arifin Tasrif said, as quoted by Reuters, commenting on the news about the new tender.
Indonesia has 128 basins with oil and gas resources. Of these, 68 have not been tapped for exploration yet, according to Tasrif.
Earlier this year, a government official said there were plans to offer a total of 10 exploration blocks in 2024.
The first tender for the year included an onshore block in East Kalimantan that contains an estimated 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas as well as blocks in Central Andaman with resources estimated at 100 million barrels of crude and 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
The tender also includes a set of blocks in Sulawesi, both onshore and offshore, holding some 850 million barrels of oil and 4.7 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to the energy ministry.
Indonesia has crude oil reserves estimated at some 2.27 billion barrels as of 2022 and natural gas reserves of 36.34 trillion cubic feet as of the same year.
The latest major discovery in the country was announced last December by Emirati Mubadala Energy. According to analysts, it was the second-largest deepwater gas discovery of 2023, producing 30 million cubic feet daily, with plans to boost this to 12 billion cu m by 2030.
