State oil and gas company PT Pertamina said Friday it had met the 2009 target for the government's kerosene-to-liquified-petroleum-gas (LPG) conversion program.
Pertamina implements the program by distributing conversion packs, comprising a gas stove and a 3 kilogram canister targeting low income households.
"As of December 24, the 2009 target to distribute 23.7 million conversion packets has been fulfilled by Pertamina," the company's spokesperson Basuki Trikora Putra said in a text message.
Basuki said Pertamina had also surpassed the 2009 target for the volume of distributed LPG and kerosene substituted for.
In 2009, Pertamina has distributed 1,743,922 metric tons of LPG, or 4 percent higher than the target for the year, and substituted for 5,214,709 kiloliters of kerosene, or 25 percent higher than the target.
With the same level of progress, Pertamina said it was optimistic that it could finish the program in 2010 as scheduled.
"We expect to complete the program in the first half of 2010," Pertamina's deputy director for marketing and trading Hanung Budya said in an earlier press conference.
The government launched the program in 2007 in a bid to switch public consumption from kerosene to cheaper LPG. In the past, the kerosene, which is actually the raw material for aviation fuel, was used widely as cooking fuel across the country. Three years after the conversion program started, Pertamina said that the provinces of Banten, Jakarta, West Java, Yogyakarta and South Sumatra had been converted and no longer needed kerosene for cooking purposes.
The program is also believed to have helped reduce the spending on fuel subsidies, according to Pertamina by about Rp 12.33 trillion.
Although the conversion has cut the cost of the subsidy, the 3 kilogram LPG canister, intended to be targeted to poorer consumers, may still very possibly go to higher-income consumers as the government has yet to implement a control mechanism for the targeted distribution of subsidized fuels.
The LPG distributed in other canisters of different sizes (12 and 50 kilograms) is not subsidized and costs more. So any consumers can buy the smaller canisters containing subsidized LPG.
The director general for oil and gas at the energy and mineral resources ministry Evita H. Legowo said that the government this year had tried to use coupons to help control and monitor the distribution of the 3-kilogram LPG canisters.
"We have tried this in Malang *East Java*, but I have not got the report of the results. We plan to also try this in another city in 2010, but the city has not been decided yet," she said.
