Ministry Of Energy And Mineral Resources Reviews LPG Import Press Options

JAKARTA - The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM) is reviewing various options to suppress LPG imports, which Indonesia is still doing.

Director General of Oil and Gas of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources Tutuka Ariadji said that currently Indonesia has not been able to produce large amounts of LPG.

Just so you know, Indonesia can only produce 1.2 million tons per year. Whereas domestic demand reaches 8 million tons per year, the remaining 6.8-6.7 million tons are still imported.

"That's a huge amount, 77 percent of us import. We have a lot of ideas to try to do so that it is still being discussed," said Tutuka, quoted on Friday, January 12.

According to Tutuka, there are not many sources of gas rich in C3 and C4.

For this reason, he said, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources together with the Special Task Force for Upstream Oil and Gas Business Activities (SKK Migas) still identify all gas sources upstream that have gas sources rich in C4 and C3.

"We try to identify Elpiji upstream. So we identify the gas sources for the gas fields rich c3 and c4. Later from there we have to build an LPG refinery, how much can we add for domestic production," added Tutuka.

Another option that will be taken by the government is to use more existing gas sources, namely by utilizing pipeline gases, gas networks (jargas) and using compressed natural gas (CNG).

"We are trying to make CNG more widely used," concluded Tutuka.