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Oil & gas fields auction this month to be on simpler terms Sources

NEW DELHI: After more than a 4-year break, India will this month launch auction of discovered oil and gas fields on simpler contractual terms together with pricing and marketing freedom. Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan will on May 25 launch the Discovered Small Fields Bid Round, official sources said.

Last exploration licensing round concluded in March 2012. That was the Ninth round of bidding under the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP). A total of 256 block were awarded in the nine rounds of NELP.

Now in the new round, as many as 67 idle discoveries of state-owned ONGC and Oil India Ltd have been clubbed into 46 fields for offer in the international bidding round. Of these, 28 discoveries are in Mumbai offshore and another 14 are in the prolific Krishna Godavari basin.

As many as 10 discoveries in the Assam shelf. Sources said the government took away these discoveries from ONGC as it could not develop them because of small size and unviable price. But in the bidding round, the government is offering complete pricing freedom and ONGC too can bid to get back its discoveries. The discoveries were given up by the state run as late as 2012-13. In-place reserves in these identified discoveries/ fields is about 88 million tons of oil and oil equivalent gas.