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India mulls loan for northeastern pipeline project
PIPELINES & TRANSPORT
THE Indian government is reportedly consid- ering an INR54bn ($748mn) loan to fund a new natural gas pipeline that will connect several major cities in the country’s north-east.
e INR90bn ($1.25bn), 1,656-km North- East Natural Gas Pipeline Grid does not have any anchor customers, local newswire PTI quoted an unnamed o cial as saying, making it econom- ically unviable.
“Aviabilitygapfundingof60%oftheproject cost has been sought,” the o cial said, adding that the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had supported the request and that the Cabinet was likely to consider it soon.
e pipeline will connect the cities of Guwa- hati, Silchar and Numaligarh in Assam State to Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh, Dimapur and Kohima in Nagaland, Imphal in Manipur, Aizawl in Mizoram, Agartala in Tripura, Shil- long in Meghalaya and Gangtok in Sikkim.
e newswire’s source said the development consortium, which consists of state-run GAIL (India), Indian Oil Corp. (IOC), Oil and Natu- ral Gas Corp. (ONGC), Oil India Ltd (OIL) and
Numaligarh Re nery Ltd (NRL), would not be able to execute the project without government backing. e companies will cover the pipeline’s remaining cost via equity and debt.
e project is part of the government’s ongo- ing e orts to expand gas consumption within the northeastern states as well as at a national level.
In 2016, New Delhi unveiled its North East Vision 2030 plan, which outlined a goal of ensuringeveryhouseholdhasaccesstoa orda- ble supplies of piped natural gas or liquid petro- leum gas (LPG). To this end, it outlined plans to expand the region’s city gas distribution (CGD) networks.
At a national level, India has set a goal of increasing the cleaner-burning fuel’s share of the primary energy mix to 15% by 2030 from around 6% at present.
Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Dhar- mendra Pradhan said on August 26 that the gas sector was the target of INR5tn ($69.95bn) worth of investment, with some of that earmarked for projects that will add around 15,000km of pipe- line to the existing 16,788-km network.™
OGNC plans OALP development spending
FINANCE & INVESTMENT
INDIA’S state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) has reportedly drawn up a four-year, $400mn development plan for blocks won in the country’s first three Open Acreage Licence Programme (OALP) bid rounds.
The major has begun acquiring seismic data across the 13 blocks it was awarded in the rounds, BusinessLine quoted an unnamed com- pany o cial as saying.
“ is [seismic work] will cost around 3-4% of the total exploration spend of these blocks. is will be followed by exploratory drilling. In all, we intend to spend close to $400mn to develop
these blocks,” the source added. “ e spends on OALP blocks will re ect in the nancial year 2020-2021.”
ONGC has set an investment target of INR329.21bn ($4.57bn) for 2019-2020, with chairman and managing director Shashi Shan- ker revealing in mid-August that the com- pany intended to spend INR830bn ($11.51bn) on 25 upstream projects to boost oil and gas production.
He said 15 of those projects were already in development and that all 25 would add 180mn tonnes of oil equivalent (1.32bn boe) in “cumu- lative” production.
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 35 04•September•2019