PHE incident commander Taufik Aditiyawarman expressed hope that the leak would be stopped by Oct. 8 — three days later than originally scheduled — attributing the delay to technical challenges in drilling the relief well.

The relief well is a narrow borehole designed to “intercept” the leaking well by injecting a fluid that will plug the leak at a depth of 2,765 meters. Pertamina last reported that it had drilled 1,947 m of the relief well, or 70.4 percent of its final depth.

“Hopefully, by Oct. 6 we can intercept the leaking well. That’s our current estimate,” Taufik said on Monday at a press conference in Jakarta.

The leaking well, designated YYA-1, is located in the PHE-operated ONWJ Block off the coast of Karawang, West Java. Signs of the oil spill first appeared on July 12, when its oil rig workers detected a well kick — a release of gas caused by low pressure in a wellbore — that worsened over the next two days.

PHE has deployed 45 ships, lowered 6.8 kilometers of static oil boom to contain the waterborne oil spill and removed 13,427 barrels of offshore oil since Aug. 1. The well is estimated to be leaking around 3,000 barrels of oil per day.

Taufik said PHE was still calculating total damages, but a source told the The Jakarta Post that the incident would cost Pertamina “hundreds of billions of rupiah”.

“The cost of stopping and managing the oil spill will be enormous, as a lot will be spent on renting the rig to make the relief well and to finance operations. And we don’t know when it will be stopped,” the source said.

PHE said on Monday that it was also facing delays in distributing compensation to residents of the beaches and villages across nine regions in Karawang that were affected by the spill.

The PHE crisis management team’s external affairs head, Rifky Effendi, who had previously said that compensation would be disbursed by the week of Aug. 26, said the team was still verifying the identities of over 10,000 affected residents and their individual losses. The team had verified 90 percent of compensation recipients to date.

Rifky added that PHE was working with state-owned banks Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) and Bank Mandiri to open bank accounts for every affected household to ensure that the compensation reached the intended recipients.

“The delay doesn’t mean we’re neglecting our promises, but the disbursement is a long process to ensure that the [funds] are accountable and auditable,” he said.

Rifky did not mention the exact figure of the compensation that would be disbursed to affected residents, and only said that PHE was complying with Environment and Forestry Ministerial Regulation No. 7/2014 on losses from environmental contamination.

The regulation provides complex formulas for calculating compensation for losses in economic activity, health and environmental recovery.

PHE said on Aug. 9 that it would pay local fisherfolk at least Rp 100,000 (US$7) per day for incurred economic losses for the duration of its recovery efforts.

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