Other concerns include the ever growing reliance on state oil and gas company Pertamina to take over expiring blocks from international companies, to develop existing and hopefully new blocks, or a recent headline: “Pertamina sells off shares to stay afloat”, or Pertamina’s concern to meet the government’s policy of ensuring availability of subsidized low-octane Premium grade fuel at one price throughout the whole country. One senior person from Pertamina told me recently, we will survive until the election, but what happens after that, who knows.

So how will Pertamina develop new or existing blocks? How will it carry out exploration needed to find new giant oil and gas fields? The chances of finding giant fields are fairly low, because if they were available they would have been found by now with existing methods of exploration. I learned that giant fields referred to anything containing a probable reserve of 500 million barrels of oil. There are fields that contain this amount and more, just waiting to be confirmed and exploited; one such field has been known about for several years, but due to political and other reasons this has not been developed until now.

Indeed Indonesia does have the potential to be self-supportive in resources, if only the knowledge of the country’s resources was known. But sadly until now, the potential of the country’s resources is just that, potential. What became apparent from the aforementioned workshop was that many people are concerned with the situation, but very few (if any) are prepared to take the risk for exploration, which includes Indonesia’s banks and entrepreneurs. What does risk mean? Put simply, it means loss of money. Why does Indonesia expect investors from other countries to lose money when it is not prepared to accept the risk itself?

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