Despite the oil price crash, Indonesia's state-owned oil and gas firm Pertamina continues to pursue its target to raise oil and gas production by 1.8 percent in 2020, according to upstream director Dharmawan Samsu.
"Pertamina strives to maintain upstream investments in fulfilling national oil demand but with several adjustments based on our priorities to ensure project economics," Dharmawan said in a statement, carried by The Jakarta Post.
While major international oil firms are slashing capital expenditures and production guidance due to the unsustainabiy low oil prices, the national oil and gas company of Indonesia is not changing its target to boost total production to 923,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), Pertamina's executive said.
Despite the financial pressure stemming from the oil price collapse, the company will aim to reach its previously set production targets, Dharmawan noted.
It's not clear how Pertamina's intention to stick to its plan to raise production would dovetail with plans of the world's major oil-producing nations to discuss a massive global production cut to help save oil prices from crashing further amid cratering demand.
On Monday, Pertamina said that its oil and gas production in the first quarter of the year hit 99 percent of the target. Crude oil production stood at 421,000 barrels per day (bpd) and natural gas production was 2,887 million cubic feet per day (mmscfd) in Q1, the company said.
According to estimates from Rystad Energy from February, Indonesia's oil and gas production will most likely decline this year and will not hit the government's official estimate of achieving 8-percent growth in 2020 compared to 2019.
"Out of the eight fields starting up in 2020, only Malacca Strait Phase 1 is an oil play and will not on its own replace the declining production from Indonesia's mature fields. Because of this and the delays to projects that were set to start producing in 2019, even maintaining 2019 levels of oil production might be difficult - let alone meeting the growth targets set by SKK Migas," Rystad Energy's Senior Upstream Analyst Prateek Pandey said.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More
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