The government liberalised the regime for oil and gas exploration by announcing Open Acreage Licensing process that allows companies to carve their own areas for hydrocarbon hunting.

Speaking at event of unveiling the National Data Repository, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan said, “As much as 52 per cent of India’s sedimentary basins are still unappraised and the last seismic data acquisition of the unappraised sedimentary basins was undertaken by the government nearly 25 years ago.”

OAL will be under the Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP).

“We realised that the lack of updated G&G (geological and geophysical) data for the Indian Sedimentary Basin has been hampering our E&P (Exploration and Production) force. That’s why, the National Seismic Program was started last year,” he added.

New policies

Pradhan said that the government is also coming up with new policies for Enhanced Oil Recovery, Production Enhancement Contracts, and a Shale Oil & Gas Policy for NELP and Pre-NELP blocks under the next set of PSC Reforms.

The next round of bidding Round under the Discovered Small Field policy is also on the crosshairs of the government.

Atanu Chakraborty, Director-General of the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons, told reporters on the sidelines of the launch that the first window for submitting bids under the OAL will be from July 1 to November 15 this year.

The finalisation of block and invitation of bids will take place on December 15. The bid submission window will be open for 10 weeks from then and the bid evaluation and declaration of bid winner will be done in another 10 weeks.

When asked what the criteria for awarding will be if some acreage gets a single bid, Chakraborty said, “When someone identifies the acreage, a revenue commitment is also submitted for it. The bids will be conducted based on those revenue commitments under the revenue sharing contract.”

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