Oil and Natural Gas Corp has engaged contracts for seven oil and gas blocks it had won in the recent bid round. Oil India Ltd signed up for the remaining four blocks awarded under the fifth bid round of Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OLAP). Speaking at the signing ceremony, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said with the latest bid round, the government has in the last four years awarded 1.56 lakh square kilometre of acreage for finding and producing oil and gas.
This compares to 90,000 sq km of area awarded in nine rounds of New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) and pre-NELP awards in the previous two decades. Red-tape and multiple permissions needed for exploring and producing oil and gas have in the past led to several slippages in the committed timelines.
“Tell us, if you need more help” Minister said asking explorers to give suggestions on improving the regulatory environment. “Business as usual cannot work.”
The minister also wanted the data repository set up by his ministry’s upstream nodal agency, the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH), to be remodelled on lines of the National Geoscience Data Repository (NGDR) of the Ministry of Mines. He wanted the data repository, which houses geological data of Indian sedimentary basins, to become an independent profit centre.
The NGDR is a public-private initiative for all non-coal and non-fuel resources. The government had offered 11 blocks for exploration and production of oil and gas in OLAP-V. A total of 12 bids, including seven bids by ONGC and four by OIL, were received for the 11 blocks on offer at the close of bidding on June 30. Invenire Petrodyne Ltd was the only private bidder for one block.
While ONGC was the sole bidder for six blocks, OIL was the lone bidder in all the four blocks it bid for. ONGC won all six blocks where it was the sole bidder and also the one block where Invenire Petrodyne had bid. The previous bid round, OLAP-IV, too had seen just eight bids coming in for seven blocks on offer. ONGC had walked away with all the seven oil and gas blocks on offer.
