JAKARTA ~ State-owned oil and gas company Pertamina will undertake six oil exploration projects this year in Ecuador, one of its executives said.

“There are six oil exploration projects in Ecuador. They’re all production-sharing contracts,” the firm’s upstream operations director, Sukusen Soemarinda, told reporters on Monday, referring to the projects Pertamina will move into.

He said that all the projects were in the upstream sector and that only one was offshore but gave no further details.

The projects, he said, had been agreed through a strategic alliance agreement signed in August last year.

Once the projects begin commercial production, he expected them to add 20,000 barrels of oil a day to Pertamina’s total output.