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To boost domestic output and address the country’s shortage of natural gas, the government plans to open shale-based reserves for exploitation through a relatively new extraction process that has never been tried in Indonesia before, a senior Energy Ministry official said on Thursday.

Edy Hermantoro, the ministry’s director of upstream oil and gas, said the first tender would be conducted this year. He declined to identify the location of the shale reserves, saying only that they were in the eastern half of the country.

The extraction of gas from shale is considered a highly promising way of increasing the world’s supply of accessible gas reserves. However, it depends on a relatively new method that has so far been used almost exclusively in the US and Canada.

The government has estimated that Indonesia will suffer a gas shortage of 2.54 billion cubic feet per day this year. The current supply of gas only meets 88.9 percent of domestic needs.

According to data from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Indonesia has potential shale-based gas reserves of up to 1,000 trillion cubic feet.

Edy said the costs of drilling for shale gas will be similar to those of drilling for coal-bed-methane, another unconventional source of gas that is abundant in Indonesia.

A unit of state oil and gas company PT Pertamina has shown interest in shale gas but it said that it needed a better deal from the government if extraction is to prove economically viable.

“As the shale gas development needs new technology, we surely want to have a bigger split from the government,” said Muhammad Harun, a spokesman for Pertamina EP.

Pri Agung Rakhmanto, an energy analyst at the Reforminer Institute, said he is confident Indonesia has the necessary technology to develop the shale-based reserves and predicted that the first gas could be pumped in 2018, if work gets underway this year.

“The development and the investment cost of shale gas is not too different from conventional gas, which even Pertamina alone can develop,” he said. “It will be the answer to the country’s shortage of gas for domestic industry.”

However, he added that investors would need incentives because of the high costs and the new extraction method.