What is your vision for the future of Lemigas?

Lemigas was founded in 1965 and was designed to support the oil and gas industry. It is a difficult role to shape the identity of this vitally important sector.  Of course, my duty as the leader of this company is to constantly monitor new developments within our team. We have some constraints, such as hiring top class human capital. Where we stand apart from everyone else is that we are both autonomous and linked to the government. That gives us the right to surf the industry, which as you can imagine gives us flexibility to take advantage of new market developments. Right now is the moment to expand Lemigas. At present, we are proud to announce we have added 60 consultants and experts to our team. This growth has improved both our quality and quantity of human capital.

Where would you like to see the states of Lemigas in the future?

Our outlook for these upcoming years is a continued positive relationship with the Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy . However, it is necessary for Lemigas to see growth due to the positioning of our oil fields.

What do you think can be done to change the perception of the opportunities within the energy sector in order to increase the partnerships?

From a macroeconomic perspective, the low oil prices can be perceived as a disaster or as an opportunity. Now, local companies can buy oil fields at cheaper prices, and then, along with oil price, the renewable energy sector development can flourish. Indonesia is an oil rich country. However, it must be pointed out that West Indonesia is quite mature. In the industry, we call these mature sites “brown fields”, as they have already been significantly excavated. It is unlikely to see new exploration activity in West Java, but there are deeper, “green sites” off the east coast of Java. However, this creates a social problem with local community because they oppose it.

The biggest challenge of exploration in Indonesia is that it’s very expensive to build the large scale infrastructure required to explore the very deep green field sites. The prioritization of the Blue Economy as stated by Pak Jokowi and Pak Indroyono Susilo, should make the development of infrastructure across the archipelago more feasible.

An additional opportunity is conventional and non-conventional gas, but there are problems with acquisition and permits. Thankfully, President Joko Widodo has announced his introduction of a one stop arrangement for the acquisition of business licenses. This will give reassurance to international investors looking to the energy sector. It is incredibly important to offer contractors and international investors proof they are working in a legal and sustainable manner.

What is your ongoing approach to technological development? What challenges do you see and how do you intend to overcome them?

When we develop technological innovations, we must first implement the developments into our research facilities to ensure that they are viable, effective, and sustainable. However, technology for a purely academic purpose is not useful, so we have to make sure that our new developments are applicable and useful in the field for both the public and private sector.

The next step is to collaborate with different public and private companies so that our developments can support the industry. The third step is that we can suggest policy and regulation reform to the government, based on new developments and innovations in the market, in the interest of growing the energy sector. We are able to do this because of Lemigas’ enviable position, having experience with both the government and private companies.

Constant research and technological development is at the heart of what we do, and we implement our expertise in such a way to help all stakeholders within the industry.

Do you think human capital, rather than capital expenditure, is the biggest limiting factor to Indonesian long term development?

Human capital development restricts every government to a certain degree. It is the most pressing issue for most of this country’s institutions, and for Lemigas as well. We have aging equipment that hampers the development of technology, but this technology can be upgraded with the necessary money. Our biggest problem is that we need to obtain and secure the human capital in Indonesia. We are, in fact, very instrumental in this challenge, being constantly on the lookout for people with the right attitude. If someone is hardworking, creative, and ambitious, they can succeed at Lemigas. And we actively nurture this talent to benefit the entire nation’s energy sector.