New energy players rising in Asia
New energy players rising in Asia
JAKARTA When Supramu Santosa started in the oil and gas business in Indonesia in 1968, it was dominated by a state-owned company and foreign multinationals. The only job he could get was as a “roughneck,” a menial laborer on oil rigs, carrying bags of cement for a meager wage. Three decades later, he owned an oil and gas company.
Not many people have heard of Star Energy Group, the company Santosa created in partnership with an Indonesian financial investor in 2003. But its existence is the fruit of an extraordinary personal rise and a sign of changing times in the oil and gas industry in Indonesia and elsewhere in resource-rich Southeast Asia.
As multinational energy companies have cut back on exploration in Indonesia because of concerns over the investment environment in recent years, a new breed of energy player has quietly emerged and prospered.
These locally owned exploration and production companies number only a handful. They are too small to take on the global oil and gas firms. And they alone cannot turn around the sharp decline in production in Indonesia, the only member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in the Asia Pacific region. But they are gradually changing the face of an industry in Indonesia in which private investment has been almost entirely dependent on big U.S. and European energy companies.
More: iht.com