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In an attempt to reduce fuel imports, state oil and gas
company Pertamina is planning to increase the capacity of its oil
refinery plants by about five percent or about 53,000 barrels per day
next year from the current production level of about
1.06 million bpd.
Pertamina's processing director Suroso said after a meeting with
Pertamina's board of commissioners Friday that the increase
in the plants' capacity would enable the company to reduce the
country's fuel imports by 300,000 bpd.
"We cannot increase the processing capacity by more than five percent
because the existing refineries have been operating at
their installed capacities," Suroso was quoted by Antara as saying.
An increased processing capacity would not only result in a rise in
fuel production but the production of other oil
derivative products such as lubricants and aromatics, he said.
Indonesia imports about a third of its oil products because its daily
refining capacity of 1.06 million barrels is not
sufficient to meet domestic demand.
Pertamina had to increase imports in July after its Dumai refinery shut
down for two days in June and operated at as low as
60 percent capacity after that.
The crude distillation unit at the 170,000 bpd refinery in Dumai in
Riau is running at 90 percent capacity. Pertamina will
restart an 8,000 bpd gasoline-making unit at the refinery on Sept. 1
after shutting it for 20 days for maintenance.
Pertamina said earlier that it would delay the maintenance of its
refineries in Balikpapan and Balongan until next year.
The company was scheduled to do the work, which will take 20 days,
later this year. Balikpapan refinery has a capacity of
260,000 bpd, while Balongan can process 125,000 bpd.
Hanung Budya, deputy director of trading and marketing at the company,
said in Bali on Thursday that the state oil company
planned to build 500,000 kiloliters of fuel storage in the next four
years to cope with expected increases in the country's
fuel consumption.
Pertamina will build a fuel facility to stock as much as 200,000 kl
(about 1.25 million barrels) in Tuban in the eastern part
of Java
Pertamina will need another 300,000 kl of additional storage capacity
within the next three or four years, he said as
reported by Bloomberg. The company will probably build a facility in
western Java, he said.
Lack of funds has held back Pertamina's expansion in storage capacity
for the last decade. The company currently depends on
leasing tankers that are moored offshore to provide additional capacity
as demand increases.
Another 300,000 kl of storage capacity in Balongan will be ready for
use by September, Budya said.
Pertamina will need to spend $1 billion to build retail stations and
storage facilities in the next five years, Ari Soemarno,
the company's president director, said recently.
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