Pradhan kicks off roadshow for auction of 46 oil & gas fields
Kicking off the first roadshow for auctioning 46 discovered small oil and gas fields, Union Oil Minister
Dharmendra Pradhan today expressed confidence of getting good response for the blocks which are
being sold with least conditionalities.
Promising a transparent regulatory regime and greater ease of doing business, the minister said the
current auction, as also the recently announced Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP),
are both significant improvements over the previous NELP regime.
"The spirit behind the journey from NELP to HELP is to create administrative and fiscal systems which
are a lot simpler and transparent," Pradhan said, adding that since these fields have no pre-qualification
criteria, he expects good participation from even startups and individuals with experience in the field.
He said as part of the discovered small fields bids, 67 different small fields across nine sedimentary
basins are on the block. Out of this, 36 are offshore fields and the rest onshore or shallow water fields.
These blocks were originally discovered by ONGC and Oil India some 40 years ago, but could not be
developed due to various reasons.
These 67 blocks on offer are present in 46 contract areas with 625 million barrels of oil or oil equivalent
gas of in-place reserves worth Rs 70,000 crore. These are spread over 1,500 sq km over land, shallow
water and deep-water areas, he added.
The minister further said the bid round aims to boost the oil and gas production and is in line with the
government mission of reducing import dependence by 2022 by 10 per cent from the present 78 per
cent.
"We realised that without addressing the fundamental challenges facing our domestic E&P industry, we
won't be able to ramp up domestic oil and gas production. We are also convinced that a simplified and
transparent administrative and regulatory setup has a huge role in fast-tracking developmental activities
in hydrocarbon sector," Pradhan said.
The country meets 78 per cent of its oil and gas demand through imports. Of its total demand of 226
million tonnes, only 70 million tonnes are produced domestically.
"Given our 78 per cent dependence on imports, I strongly believe that all quantities of hydrocarbon – big
or small – are crucial for us and therefore, we feel that these new bids are a timely step in the right
direction," he said.
Some of the key features of the new policy include no upfront signature bonus, freedom in pricing, no
oil cess, custom duty exemption and graded royalty rates, Director General of Hydrocarbons Atanu
Chakraborty said.
He said interested parties can access information dockets through the e-bidding gateway, which is live
from today. They can also access physical data centers with interpretation facility in Noida, Calgary,
London and Houston.