Deputy minister Arcandra Tahar introduced last week the revised Ministerial Regulation No. 7/2019, saying that it was expected to ramp up domestic oil and gas exploration in meeting the country’s growing energy demands without widening the billion-dollar trade deficit.

“It’s better for us to open the data and allow those who have the necessary skills to freely see the data,” he told reporters in Jakarta, adding that such skilled individuals included domestic and foreign academics, engineers and investors.

Arcandra’s point is best captured by Article 5, which does not only authorize the ministry to receive both raw and analyzed data related to oil and gas activity in Indonesia but to also share such data, which have passed a period of confidentiality, with every ministry-registered organization.

The rest of the regulation details rules related to data storage specifications (Attachment II), transferring data abroad (Article 31) and a data amnesty program (Article 46) for companies that have not submitted required data to the ministry, among other things.

Indonesia stored 3.15 billion barrels worth of proven oil reserves and burned through 450.78 million barrels of fuel last year, ministry data show. Assuming the country continued a consistent burning rate, existing proven oil reserves would only last another seven years.

The government expects the regulation to help accelerate exploration into 4.36 billion barrels of potential oil reserves, which might extend the domestic oil supply lifetime by up to nine years, and into 39.49 trillion standard cubic feet of potential gas reserves.

However, the Upstream Oil and Gas Regulatory Special Task Force (SKKMigas) — an agency under the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry — writes in its latest annual report that oil and gas activity in Indonesia only rebounded to 11 working contracts last year, having hit zero contracts over the previous two years due to falling global oil prices.

Head of the ministry’s data and information technology center Agus Cahyono Adi said the ministry would sustain free access to data by changing the center’s revenue model to accommodate the public.

The ministry used to charge organizations up to US$80,000 to access such data on a region-by-region basis but will begin offering an annual subscription fee to access nationwide data at the earliest this week, when it expects a web portal to be up and running.

However, Article 27 says that organizations paying the subscription fee — becoming official “members” of the ministry — will benefit from having access to the unconfidential analyzed data while those “nonmembers” who access the data for free can only access raw data.

The Indonesian Petroleum Association (IPA) is one of the larger advocates for “free data access”, as members say that such access would help mediate exploration-related risks and thus make the country’s oil and gas industry more attractive to investors.

“The IPA, of course, welcomes the newly revised ministerial regulation,” said IPA executive director Marjolijn “Meity” Wajong in a short text message to The Jakarta Post.

Andrew Harwood, research director at global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said that “easy access to transparent oil and gas data will allow explorers to develop new models, analyze historical trends, and make better, informed investment decisions on a more regular basis.”

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