Indonesia moves to slash energy imports

President Widodo is pushing the upstream and downstream sectors hard to meet domestic demand

Indonesia’s government has overhauled the Pertamina leadership and set ambitious new exploration targets to further reduce the country’s dependence on oil and gas imports, which despite volume falling by nearly 20pc year-on-year, according to Statistics Indonesia (BPS), are still a drag on economic growth. President Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi, reshuffled the leadership of the country’s NOC, Pertamina on 22 November. He appointed Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, as president commissioner, telling the popular former mayor of Jakarta—who only in January was released three and a half months early release from his two-year blasphemy sentence—to prioritise reducing imports. Widodo h