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tate own oil and gas company PT Pertamina, the sole shareholders of Pertamina Hulu Energy or PHE, has appointed Ignatius Tenny Wibowo, as the new president director of the firm's upstream unit.

Tenny, currently PHE's international ventures director, will replace Salis S. Aprilian who will move on as senior vice president for gas and power at Pertamina.

Tenny's appointment is based on his accomplishments when he was general manager of PHE Offshore North West Java (ONWJ), a PHE subsidiary.

'During his tenure, PHE ONWJ doubled its crude oil output to 40,000 barrels per day [bpd] last year from 22,000 in 2009,' Pertamina spokesman Ali Mundakir said in a text-message on Tuesday.

In 2009, Pertamina took over a 46 percent share of the North West Java offshore block from BP West Java, a transaction estimated to be worth US$280 million. The state-owned company holds the controlling interest in the block.

Tenny, who at the time of the acquisition was vice president of BP West Java, moved to Pertamina as general manager of PHE ONWJ.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Tenny said he wanted to meet PHE's 2013 daily average output target of 76,000 bpd of crude oil as well as 530 million metric standard cubic feet per day (mmscfd) of natural gas by the end of this year.

Should PHE meet the target, he said, it would mean a 31 percent increase in crude oil production and an 8 percent increase in gas output.

'Our daily average production in 2012 was 58,000 bpd for crude and around 485 mmscfd gas,' he said.

By April this year PHE's crude output had already reached 63,000 bpd while its gas output is still around 485 mmscfd.

PHE has 49 contracts in Indonesia including the novel coal bed methane (CBM) blocks and those in which PHE had formed units to act as operators, such as in the oil and gas block West Madura Offshore and the ONWJ block.

PHE owns shares in oil and gas blocks in seven countries: Block BMG/VIC in Australia, Block 3WD in Iraq, Block SK-305 in Malaysia, Block 3 in Qatar, Block 13 in Sudan, Block 17-3 and Block 123-3 in Libya and Blocks 10 and 11 in Vietnam.

A source familiar with the issue said the relationship between Salis and Pertamina president director Karen Agustiawan turned sour following his statement late last year over the elimination of BPMigas.

On Nov. 17 last year, a week after the Constitutional Court disbanded BPMigas, Salis told the press that Pertamina would be ready to take over BPMigas's role as the nation's upstream oil and gas watchdog.

Five days after the statement, Karen told a press briefing that Pertamina would not stray from its plan to become one of the leading oil companies in Southeast Asia by 2014 and in the world by 2023.

'I object that the company would have to go back to the old days during this transition period,' she declared.

The government has established an interim regulator, SKKMigas, to audit existing oil and gas contracts following a court order.