Pertamina to Focus on CBM Instead of Shale Gas

Indonesia’s state owned firm, Pertamina is likely to focus on coal bed methane (CBM) instead of shale gas as its choice of unconventional gas to develop in the near future.

Pertamina would invest around $1.5 billion to develop 200 CBM exploration wells in the next five years, company’s upstream subsidiary Pertamina Hulu Energi (PHE) operations director, Eddy Purnomo, said, Jakarta Post reported. He said that the company may even boost the investment if production target is hiked.

The company expects to produce 100 million metric standard cubic feet per day (mmscfd) of coal bed methane by 2017 and hopes to reach the output level of 150 to 500 mmscfd beyond 2020, the newspaper reported Purnomo as saying.

Currently, PHE possesses around 23 CBM production-sharing contracts (PSCs), all of which the firm expected to start producing in 2017. Currently, all of the contracts are still in the exploration phase. In total, according to Pertamina’s data, the firm has potential CBM reserves of 41.67 trillion cubic feet (tcf).

Pertamina would likely to focus its attention on developing CBM’s potential first rather than shale gas, as PHE so far only had one potential PSC to develop shale gas in Rantau, North Sumatra. 

“We really need to learn from the beginning about how to develop shale gas as we do not have any expertise on the operation of shale gas production. We are planning to send a team to the US to learn more about shale gas,” he added.