Having hired United States well control company Boots & Coots, which handled the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, state-owned energy giant Pertamina has shut down its operations in the Offshore North West Java (ONWJ) Block and is prioritizing efforts to stop the oil spill and mitigate environmental damage. 

The emergency response team of Pertamina Hulu Energi (PHE), Pertamina’s upstream subsidiary, has also been working closely with local communities affected by the oil spill, with help from the Indonesian Military (TNI). Seven villages in Karawang, West Java, have been affected, with oil spilling into the sea and covering beaches within walking distance of houses.

Pertamina upstream director Dharmawan Samsu said the company would need at least until the end of September to fix the well that broke two weeks ago.

“We need eight weeks from today or 10 weeks from the first day of the incident” to stop the leak and completely close down the broken YYA-1 well, Dharmawan told the press on Thursday. That timeframe excludes cleaning up the contaminated sea and beaches.

Pertamina will deploy a portable rig to inject cement into the broken well. Afterward, the YYA-1 well will be closed “forever”, Dharmawan said, adding that “for other areas, we will conduct evaluations based on economic value.”

To contain the oil spill, Pertamina has deployed 29 ships and stretched out more than 6 kilometers of oil booms, a temporary floating barrier used to reduce the pollution of shorelines, he added.

“The first measure is to close down the broken well, so we can stop the well from leaking more oil,” said Fajriyah Usman, Pertamina corporate communication vice president.

The broken well is one of three wells underneath Pertamina’s offshore platform in the ONWJ Block, 2 km north of Karawang. The wells in the YY project are able to produce 3,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd). Operations have been shut down as recovery efforts continue.

“Safety comes first, everything else is secondary. The incident has to be resolved completely,” said ReforMiner Institute researcher Pri Agung Rakhmanto.

Pertamina declined to disclose the financial losses incurred by the incident, which has also damaged the offshore platform, tilting it several degrees. Capital expenditure for the YY project totaled US$85.4 million, according to data from PHE.

“We’re now focusing only on measures to minimize the environmental impact,” Dharmawan said. 

The oil spill follows a gas well kick incident on July 12, an unplanned and often violent release of gas caused by low pressure in a wellbore, in the reactivated YYA-1 well, an exploration well located beneath PHE’s ONWJ offshore platform.

The incident has seen Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan question Pertamina’s ability to maintain the offshore platform. “The ONWJ Block has been operated by Pertamina since 2018 and now there’s a problem. Can Pertamina operate offshore platforms?” he wrote in an Instagram post last week.

Pertamina has acknowledged that the oil spill would affect the block’s productivity, as production had been stopped since the incident, but expects other fields to offset the losses incurred from the YY project.

“The full-year target could still be achieved,” Dharmawan said.

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