Drilling Professional Skills Transfer: Petroleum Industry Support to Geothermal Development in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia has an established petroleum industry dates back from 1870 when the first oil well drilled in Majalengka. The long history of petroleum exploration and production in Indonesia has resulted in an established petroleum industry with a lot of local expert. Thus, a wide availability of expert and professional in petroleum industry can be utilized to support government goal for Indonesia development, such as geothermal energy development.

Government of Indonesia (Gol) is planning to increase the installed capacity of geothermal power plant installed capacity from currently about 1,900 MW into 7241 MW in 2025 (RUEN, 2017). Jennejohn (2010) calculated that it needs 4.25 full-time positions and 16 person-years for one megawatt electricity generated from geothermal. Therefore, with the addition of four-fold capacity, the number of personnel needs of staffs and experts in the field of geothermal will require approximately 22,699 jobs with 85,456 person-year employment. The drillers and crew are among those workforces besides geoscientists, engineers, hydrologists and operations personnel which must be prepared before starting a geothermal project (Smillie et al., 2015).

The geothermal drilling manpower needs can be obtained from new job candidate training or transfer from related industries. Many of the workforces in the Indonesian geothermal drilling indeed come from the petroleum drilling because of many similarities on technology and equipment. However, these workforces tend to apply the same approach to oil and gas in the geothermal industry due to some similarities in the drilling process despite there are some fundamental differences between the two. Thus, such approach might create problem in the future, both in drilling safety and operational concern. This paper aim to highlight the existing drilling professional skills in petroleum industry and the adjustment need for geothermal drilling. This paper also aims to provide suggestion in which area the current geothermal drilling skills are lacking and can be improved to help the Gol achieves its target.