Oil & Gas Industry

Indonesia is one of Southeast Asia's oldest oil producers, and for a foreign professional weighing a career here the first thing to grasp is that the oil half of the business is in long, managed decline. Production peaked at roughly 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in the mid-1990s. By 2025 it had fallen to around 600,000 bpd — enough to meet the state-budget lifting target, but barely a third of the peak. Against consumption of about 1.6 million bpd, it has been a net oil importer since roughly 2004, now buying in close to a million barrels a day.

The causes are structural: ageing fields, few large new discoveries, and the rising cost of coaxing more from mature reservoirs. The government keeps an official target of 1 million bpd by 2030 under SKK Migas's IOG 4.0 plan, though officials themselves admit it will be hard. Refining tells a similar story: eight Pertamina refineries of around 1.2 million bpd nameplate capacity meet only about 60% of fuel demand, though the upgraded Balikpapan refinery (360,000 bpd) came online in 2025.

The framework has changed since the boom years. The upstream regulator is no longer BP Migas, dissolved by the Constitutional Court in 2012, but SKK Migas. The old cost-recovery Production-Sharing Contract, under which the state took the lion's share of output, now runs alongside a "gross split" scheme introduced in 2017; since 2025 contractors may choose between the two. Chevron has gone — its giant Rokan block in Riau passed to Pertamina Hulu Rokan in 2021, now the country's single largest oil producer, ahead of ExxonMobil's Cepu block in East Java. Indonesia left OPEC's ranks in 2016 and, as a net importer, has not rejoined.

Doom & Gloom for Oil, but Gas may yet be Indonesia's energy star

Gas is where the growth, and much of the future hiring, sits. Indonesia has shipped LNG since the late 1970s, and the big forward projects are gas: bp's Tangguh LNG in West Papua is expanding, and Inpex's Abadi field in the Masela block, off the Arafura Sea, is moving toward a final investment decision, a development projected to absorb up to 10,000 workers. Natuna's large gas reserves remain in play, though they lie in waters contested by China, which makes them as much a sovereignty question as a commercial one.

For the foreign national the practical reality is straightforward. Energy roles are filled through a sponsoring company, which must first secure RPTKA foreign-worker approval, then a work permit and a limited-stay KITAS. Foreigners work on fixed-term contracts, not permanent posts, and many oil and gas jobs sit in remote areas that carry extra police and immigration reporting on top of the standard permit — get that wrong and the penalty runs to deportation. For the current immigration and work-permit requirements, Okusi Associates is the authoritative reference.

Contributor: RossScholes