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tate oil and gas firm PT Pertamina launched on Thursday mobile fuel stations to operate in industrial, mining and plantation areas as well as remote locations where fuel stations were scarce.

By the middle of June, 65 mobile fuel stations would be ready for the road, to be spread throughout the archipelago, Pertamina sales and marketing director Hanung Budya Yuktyanta said.

“This is our initiative to support the government’s program in controlling fuel consumption,” Hanung told reporters after the launching ceremony at the company’s office.

Each mobile station — a truck equipped with fuel tank, nozzle, fuel meter and printer — has a total capacity of between 5,000 and 8,000 liters of non-subsidized diesel fuel, he explained.

The stations will be operated by third-party vendors, and the process of choosing the agents for the stations would be completed in the next to weeks, according to Hanung, welcoming investors to become agents in distributing non-subsidized diesel fuels.

The investment required to convert a mobile tank into a fuel station is around Rp 200 million (US$21,200).

Hanung claimed that the presence of the stations would be a solution for the government’s plan to ban mining and plantation vehicles from buying subsidized fuels — an issue that has been under the spotlight recently with Kalimantan governors threatening to ban coal deliveries to Java if they were not allocated more subsidized fuels.

The potential demand for subsidized fuels in coal-rich Kalimantan is expected to top 3.5 million kiloliters (KL) this year, but the central government only allocated 3.03 million KL for the island.

Therefore, Hanung said, there was no fuel scarcity in Kalimantan, but instead, a limited quota from the government to save on nationwide subsidized fuel consumption.

To curb subsidized fuel consumption, Pertamina will boost the construction of fuel stations selling non-subsidized fuels. It currently has 21 stations selling non-subsidized diesel fuel plus five stations providing only Pertamax Series products (Pertamax, Pertamax Plus and Pertamina Dex) in Greater Jakarta and Bali.

Pertamina will also introduce an information technology-based system at each fuel station that can record each vehicle’s consumption in a bid to minimize misappropriations in the distribution of subsidized fuels.

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry’s oil and gas director general, Evita Herawati Legowo, revealed the system would be first launched in Java in August and for mining and plantation companies, which would follow in September.

“The government will issue a letter of assignment for Pertamina to create such a system. Pertamina will use its budget to procure the necessary infrastructure,” she said.

For additional supervision, Evita said that downstream oil and gas regulator BPHMigas also had budget of around Rp 400 billion in 2012 for that purpose, including making stickers for government vehicles prohibited from using subsidized fuels.