Indonesia to rejoin OPEC

After a six-year hiatus, Indonesia is set to rejoin <a href=’https://theenergyyear.com/companies-institutions/opec/’>OPEC this December.

“We have received an official confirmation from the OPEC Secretary General that all the members [of the organisation] welcomed the reinstatement of Indonesia as a full member,” Indonesian Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Sudirman Said announced on Tuesday to CNN Indonesia.

The country’s membership was retracted in 2008 at its request, when its oil imports exceeded its exports. In 2014, the company extracted 852,000 barrels of oil per day and consumed about twice that amount.

With the re-acceptance of Indonesia, OPEC will gain better access to the Asian market, and Indonesia will gain better access to a crude oil supply.

This comes on the heels of the Indonesia’s SKK Migas regulator announcing on Sunday they had approved plans to invest IDR51 trillion ($3.65 billion)  to develop of 18 oil and gas fields in the year. These new investments in both maturing and undeveloped fields are projected to generate more than $10 billion of state revenue.

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