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. "Let's 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. In early May, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, said that the country was considering leaving as daily production had declined below one million barrels per day and oil imports had eclipsed exports. Two weeks later Mr Yusgiantoro confirmed the country would leave the group.

The departure of Indonesia, Opec's only member in East Asia, has been predicted since 2004 when it became a net importer of oil on the back of declining production and a steady increase in domestic demand. Indonesia's exit would be the first from Opec since 1995, when Gabon left. Last year Opec gained two new members, Angola and Ecuador. It would take the discovery of a major oil field to make Indonesia a net exporter again, something that was unlikely given the extensive exploration that had taken place in the country, according to Manouchehr Takin, an upstream analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London.

Indonesia's fields were some of the first in the world to be developed by petroleum engineers in 1885. The country joined Opec in 1962, two years after the group's formation. Last year the country it had 4.3 billion barrels of proven reserves left, according to the industry publication Oil and Gas. [e-mail] *With Agencies