Jakarta Globe, Ririn Radiawati Kusuma | October 01, 2010
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| A gas pipeline sprung a leak at Chevron Pacific Indonesia’s Duri field in Sumatra, upstream oil and gas authority BPMigas said on Friday, resulting in a drop in production of 200,000 barrels per day. Darwin Zahedy Saleh, left in this file photo, the minister of energy and mineral resources said he was confident that an increase in production could compensate for the losses. (Antara Photo/Widodo S. Jusuf) |
Up to 20 percent of the nation’s oil production capacity is offline after a gas pipeline sprung a leak at Chevron Pacific Indonesia’s Duri field in Sumatra, upstream oil and gas authority BPMigas said on Friday.
The regulator said 200,000 barrels per day of production capacity had been shut down due to a leak in a pipeline that supplied natural gas used to power oil-field operations. It said the pipeline should be repaired by Monday, with full production resuming two days later.
“The wells’ recovery will be slow. They have to shut the wells down and reactivate them carefully,” he said.
Darwin Zahedy Saleh, the minister of energy and mineral resources, on Friday said he was confident that an increase in production — once it was resumed — could compensate for the losses and that the government would still meet its 2010 production target.
However, Rudi Rubiandini, an energy analyst and drilling expert from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), said that the lost production was likely to greatly exceed the government’s forecasts.
He estimated that fixing the underground pipe and returning oil production to normal would likely take more than two weeks, possibly even up to two months, depending on the extent of the damage.
“It will take a long time to fix the problem,” he said. “It depends on the damage to the pipe.”
Rudi added that there was little the government could do to reach its production target for this year.
“This is a huge loss,” he said, noting that CPI was one of the nation’s top oil producers, accounting for about 40 percent of total output.
The halt to production comes with oil companies already struggling to reach the government’s 2010 target of 965,000 bpd, a figure used to make revenue projections in this year’s state budget.
Production averaged 935,000 bpd during the first half of the year, and BPMigas last month said the government would sell three million barrels of crude oil from its stockpile to help meet the revenue target.
About 700 CPI wells and 400 wells operated by Pertamina-Bumi Siak Pusako, a unit of state oil and gas company Pertamina, were also shut down by the failure.
The problem began on Wednesday morning when a leak was discovered in the pipe operated by Transportasi Gas Indonesia. The pipeline, located at Indragiri Hulu in Riau, is used to supply natural gas to the field for drilling works and to generate electricity.
BPMigas first estimated Chevron’s lost production at 32,000 bpd, but that was already raised to 150,000 bpd by Friday afternoon.
CPI’s president director, Abdul Hamid Batubara, declined to set a timeline for a resumption in production.
“We are focused on fixing the pipeline so they [the wells] can function immediately. We are working with TGI to fix this,” he said.
Pri Agung Rakhmanto, an energy analyst with the Reforminer Institute, said he believed the breakdown would not affect the government’s 2010 production target, assuming the problem was fixed within several days. But he added that the target was unlikely to be met anyway.
“The leak is not the reason why the government can’t reach the 2010 oil production target,” he said.
Pri Agung said the incident at the aging Duri oil field should serve as a lesson that more attention was needed to develop new sources for the fuel.
“Optimizing existing blocks is not enough,” he said. “They have to develop more. But this takes time.”
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