The government is expected to launch the tenth round of the Open Acreage Licensing Policy this week ahead of the India Energy Week scheduled to take place from Feb 11-14, oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Monday.
The round will see a focus on no-go areas and offshore hydrocarbon blocks for the exploration and production purposes.
Moreover, the contracts for the upcoming 10th round are expected to be signed as per the reforms mentioned in the Oil (Regulations and Development) Amendment Bill.
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The Bill had proposed to broaden the definition of mineral oils, which previously included only petroleum and natural gas and introduced the concept of a petroleum lease. This lease covers various activities related to mineral oils, including exploration, prospecting, production, making them merchantable, and disposal.
The Oilfield Amendment Bill was a much-needed policy measure to improve ease of doing business in the Indian upstream petroleum sector, as per industry players. Before this, a lot of different clearances were sought across various ministries like the Ministry of Mines due to statutory ambiguity over classification of petroleum blocks, creating regulatory hurdles over clearances, which has been subduing investments into production, particularly greenfield blocks.
Under the 9th oil and gas bidding round, the country’s key players who participated included state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp, Oil India, and privately held Vedanta. For the first time, the bidding witnessed Reliance and its partner bp plc coming together with ONGC to bid together for exploration of a block at the Gujarat-Saurashtra basin.
Prior to this, Reliance and bp had only participated in two of the previous eight oil and gas bid rounds since 2017. The state-run upstream company now plans to bid jointly with other hydrocarbon companies in the upcoming OALP rounds.
The government, from 2016 has brought in several changes to enhance exploration of oil and gas blocks in the country and auction it by launching Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy. This was done in its attempt to increase domestic production of oil and natural gas while reducing the country’s dependency on imports.
Under HELP, Open Acreage Licensing Programme has been launched which provides investors the freedom to carve out blocks of their choice through submission of Expression of Interest (EoI). The first bidding round under OALP was launched in January 2018 wherein 55 blocks were awarded.
The country’s exploration and production sector offers a $100 billion investment by 2030, Puri had earlier said. The government intends to increase the country’s exploration acreage to 1 million square kilometers by 2030.
Puri also said that India is likely to discuss US energy supplies to the country during the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump scheduled for later this week.
“I will be surprised if sourcing of US energy will not figure during the discussion,” Puri said. He further added that Trump’s stance on drilling more oil and increasing supplies shall bode well for India. The country imports over 85% of its crude requirements.