Indonesia would like to return to Opec one day
Indonesia may one day return to Opec despite an intention to allow its membership to expire at the end of the year, a senior oil official indicated yesterday.
Lets not say withdrawal. We would like to have a suspension, Maizar Rahman, the Opec governor for Indonesia, told Reuters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of energy ministers from the Association of South East Asian Nations.
His comments were a shift from May, when Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the energy minister, said his country would quit the group entirely. But analysts cautioned that it was unlikely Indonesia would ever again be a net exporter of oil.
Last week Indonesia said it had paid its annual US$2 million (Dh7.3m) membership dues and planned to remain part of Opec until the end of the year.
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Utah, Colorado rival OPEC oil reserves, lure Chevron, Exxon, Shell
Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates combined.
That’s not science fiction, according to Bloomberg News. Trapped in limestone up to 200 feet (61 meters) thick in the two Rocky Mountain states is enough so-called shale oil to rival OPEC and supply the U.S. for a century.
Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp., the two biggest U.S. energy companies, and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are spending $100 million a year testing new methods to separate the oil from the stone for as little as $30 a barrel. A growing number of industry executives and analysts say new technology and persistently high prices make the idea feasible.
“The breakthrough is that now the oil companies have a way of getting this oil out of the ground without the massive energy and manpower costs that killed these projects in the 1970s,” said Pete Stark, an analyst at IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colorado, research firm. “All the shale rocks in the world are going to be revisited now to see how much oil they contain.” Read more
