Page 6 - AsianOil Week 34

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India launches block offer as output declines
FINANCE & INVESTMENT
THE Indian government has o ered seven new exploration acreages under the fourth Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) bid round as it strives to boost a steady decline in national oil and gas production.
Five blocks lie in the Vindhyan Basin, one is in the Bengal Purnea Basin and the last is in the Rajasthan Basin, upstream regulator the Direc- torate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) said on August 27. e seven exploration permits cover 18,510 square km.
e bid round is the rst under the OALP regime to use a new set of criteria, introduced in February, to determine winning bidders.
Winners of blocks in Vindhyan (a Catego- ry-II basin) and Bengal Purnea (a Category-III basin) will be determined by the size of planned exploration programmes rather than the amount of production o ered to the state. e government introduced the changes to encour- age greater investment in Category-II and III basins, which are de ned as having seen little to no exploration.
Winners in the already producing Catego- ry-I basins, such as Rajasthan, are selected based
upon both their exploration programmes and an agreed 70:30 revenue share with the government. DGH said the last date for bidding was Octo- ber 31 and that the round was expected to attract $200-250mn in immediate exploration work
commitments.
e new round is part of the government’s
drive to drum up investor interest in the coun- try’s upstream to help turn around a decline in production.
Crude output fell 4.4% year on year in July to 2.77mn tonnes (655,000 barrels per day), according to new data from the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Production during the rst four months of nancial year 2019-2020 shrank by 6.22% to 10.98mn tonnes (660,000 bpd).
Production from almost all of the country’s onshore and o shore elds slipped, helping to push oil import dependence up to 84.9% from 83.4% in the same period of 2018-2019.
National gas production in July remained at at 2.72bn cubic metres, while output in the April- July period edged down to 10.75 bcm from 10.78 bcm in the year earlier period.™
250 230 210 190 170 150 130 110
90 70 50 30 10
2010-11 2011-12
2012-13 2013-14
2014-15
2015-16
Oil product consumption
2016-17
2017-18
Supply and Demand
™
2018-19
Data: PPAC
Crude/condensate production
ONGC plans Gujarat drilling campaign
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
INDIA’S state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) intends to drill 46 exploration wells in 12 onshore blocks in Gujarat State.
e company said in an environmental clear- ance application to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change that it intended to invest INR5bn ($69.9mn) in the drilling pro- gramme in the Mehsana district. e blocks cover the Linch, Shobhasan, Kadi and Mansa oil elds.
ONGC has already drilled more than 500 wells in Mehsana and has said that, based on
the hydrocarbon reserve data obtained from the region’s various oil elds, there is a lot of scope to explore new sub-surface structures in the area.
e company, India’s largest oil and gas pro- ducer, is under pressure to up its exploration spending to help stem a growing reliance on foreign imports to help bridge the gap between dwindling national supplies and expanding local demand.
Indian oil production shrank by 4.4% year on year in July to 2.77mn tonnes (655,000 barrels per day), while natural gas production was at
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