President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia said Tuesday that his country was considering quitting OPEC because it was no longer a net oil exporter.

"Our wells are drying," he said in a nationally televised speech, adding that the country needed to concentrate on increasing domestic production, which has dropped to less than a million barrels a day even as consumption rises.

The government opened talks Monday on whether it should continue to stay with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries or withdraw "until we reach a point where we deserve to rejoin that organization," Yudhoyono said.

The country of 235 million people is the only OPEC member in Southeast Asia. But it has to import oil following decades of declining investment in exploration and extraction because of corruption and a weak legal system that makes oil companies wary of doing business in Indonesia.

Indonesian oil output has declined steadily from the 1.5 million to 1.6 million barrels produced a day in the mid-1990s. It produced around 860,000 barrels a day of crude oil last month and recorded a deficit of $794 million in its oil trade accounts. Raising output could take "one to three years," Yudhoyono said.