India to get US$ 25 billion investments in oil and gas E&P by 2022: DGH

Ahmedabad: India will attract about $25 billion investments in oil and gas exploration and production by 2022, Atanu Chakraborty, director general, Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) said.

“Of these, about $22 billion worth of investments have already received necessary technical approvals. We are expecting another $3-4 billion investments from auctions under open acreage licensing programme (OLAP),” he said.

India’s total oil and gas production was 65.1 million metric tonnes of oil and oil equivalent in 2016 and the DGH’s plans are in lines with the government’s vision to reduce the country’s import dependency in oil and gas by 10% by 2022, he added.

India is the third largest consumer of oil in the world and the country’s total consumption of oil and oil equivalent was 257.8 MMT in 2016. The government plans to take India’s production to more than 100 MMT of oil and oil equivalent by 2022, said a senior DGH official who did not wish to be named.

Chakraborty, along with senior government officials was in Ahmedabad on Thursday to conduct a workshop on OLAP which was attended by representatives of E&P companies, investors and entrepreneurs. Under the new hydrocarbon exploration and licensing policy (HELP), OLAP Bid Round 1 was launched in January 2018 by petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The new policy aims to bring companies to carve out blocks of their choice with a view to tap 28 billion tonnes of unexplored hydrocarbon resources in the country. The policy paves way for unified licensing which means that companies can explore shale and coal-bed methane too in the blocks awarded to them.

“In OLAP Round 1, a total of 55 bidders selected blocks in promising basins in an area of about 60,000 sq. km by way of international competitive bidding,” Chakraborty said in an interaction on the side lines of the event.

India’s natural gas production, which is currently at 80 million cubic meters per day, will see an addition of another 50-55 million cubic meters per day by 2022, he added.

Talking about the auctioning under discovered small field (DSF) policy, DGH said that the first round saw overwhelming response with 134 bidders and resulted in entry of 13 new entrants that included 12 private and one foreign entity.

The second round of bidding of DSP will soon be launched by the government. “Sixty discovered small fields having established in-place volumes of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil and oil equivalent gas in commercially producing basins are likely to be offered in DSF-2. As compared to DSF-1, the fields are larger in size with almost double in-place volumes,” according to Chakraborty.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.