Pertamina Launches 9 Crude Oil Innovation Products To Petrochemicals

ESG illustration (photo: dock. Unsplash)

JAKARTA - PT Pertamina (Persero) officially launched 9 innovation products that already have patents for processing crude into petrochemical products.

Pertamina President Director Nicke Widyawati said that apart from the 9 innovation products, Pertamina currently has 49 patents for downstreaming crude into petrochemical products and at the same time there are more than 200 innovation programs currently being worked on by the PT Pertamina Research Technology and Innovation Team (Persero).

"For Pertamina's business sustainability, crude for chemical will be very important, because chemical is currently more than 80 percent still imported. So our focus today is how all the products we produce today can be processed into chemical to reduce imports. Import substitution is the main tagline," said Nicke Widyawati, quoted on Friday, June 23.

According to Nicke, Pertamina's innovation is an answer to global challenges faced by energy companies such as Pertamina and also faced by other global energy companies.

"Global energy transitions demand that we make changes, but on the other hand we still have to maintain energy security, at the same time we also have to maintain affordability and also start building sustainability. We have to work on these three things together," added Nicke.

Therefore, continued Nicke, in parallel Pertamina still has to maintain national energy security in the midst of the energy transition. Pertamina must also support the country's target of increasing oil and gas production to 1 million barrels per day.

"We still run security energy, but in a different way, which we call green operation and decarbonization, which is our main program," said Nicke.

Various initiatives and innovations, Pertamina Group managed to reduce 31 percent of carbon emissions from its total operations, from upstream to downstream, exceeding the national target of 29 percent. With this achievement, Pertamina is ranked 2nd in the world for ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) performance.

According to Nicke, Indonesia is awarded abundant natural resources, has enormous new renewable energy potential and Pertamina has started to innovate with CPO-based bioenergy with B35 products.

"With B35 in 2022 alone, for a year we managed to reduce carbon emissions by 28 million tons, besides that it also reduces imports so that it saves foreign exchange of IDR 122 trillion, so the impact is huge," explained Nicke.

Pada peringatan HUT Kemerdekaan RI, Pertamina akan meluncurkan inovasi produk baru berbasis CPO serta pada bulan Juli 2023, Pertamina juga akan meluncurkan inovasi produk bioethanol untuk gasoline berbasis cane, cassava, corn dan sogum.

"We will process all vegetable sources into bioenergy, because Indonesia's energy transition is not just reducing carbon emissions, but the most important thing is to realize national energy resilience, independence and sovereignty," concluded Nicke.