Indonesia pitches oil and gas investment across producing and frontier basins

Only 20 of Indonesia’s 128 sedimentary basins are producing oil and gas, leaving scope for investment in development and exploration, according to Rikky Rahmat Firdaus of SKK Migas, the country’s upstream oil and gas task force.

Rikky presented the opportunities at the 51st ASEAN Council on Petroleum and Energy (ASCOPE) event in Denpasar, Bali, on 26 October 2026. He is the task force’s deputy for exploration, development and working area management.

He set out three investment options: optimising the 20 basins already in production, developing 43 discoveries within explored basins, and undertaking exploration in 65 frontier basins. These offered choices for investors with differing strategies and risk preferences, he said.

Rikky also put Indonesia’s proven reserves at 2.3 billion barrels of oil and 35 trillion cubic feet of gas, spread across 168 oil and gas blocks. He stressed that matching resources with appropriate investment strategies could help bring them into production sooner.

He said work to improve investment conditions centred on risk-based fiscal schemes, transparent licensing and flexible access to exploration data. The aim was to lower uncertainty, widen investor participation and move more exploration prospects towards commercial discoveries and production.