Oil & Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), country’s biggest state-run oil explorer, has met

RELATED ARTICLES RIL selects Phillips 66 technology for Jamnagar plants Govt patronises RIL, alleges CPI-M Gas from KG-D6 drops to about 32 mmscmd RIL stocks down 2.32 on declining KG-D6 gas field output RIL yet to supply gas to Bawana power plant, production hit

its targets at the recent bidding of 80 oil and gas blocks offered under New Exploration Licensing Policy VIII and Coal Bed Methane IV, said a top company official on Wednesday.

“Strategically, we had targeted to win high risk-high return blocks and also virgin areas in exploration frontiers, especially in deep waters,” said RS Sharma, chairman and managing director of ONGC. “The results are in absolute conformity with our bidding strategy,” Sharma added.

ONGC, in partnership with certain consortia members, submitted bids for 25 oil and gas exploration blocks and won 17 blocks, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. (Details shown in the table)

Commenting on damp response received for NELP VIII and CBM-IV, as reported by Financial Chronicle on October 13, the chairman said that the overall response to bid round has been on expected lines. “Primarily, lack of investor interest for exploration across the world has been reason for lower number of bids. Also, lack of clarity on likely gas price implementation and the taxation regime could have contributed to the below par response to the bidding round,” Sharma added.

In the recently held bidding rounds, for deepwater blocks, ONGC had submitted 7 bids and have won all of them. Of these 7 blocks, one block is located in KG offshore and rest is in Andaman offshore. ONGC is the operator in 6 blocks and a consortium partner in one block in KG-Offshore where British Gas is the operator. In another block, ONGC is a joint operator with Oil India Ltd. “Our consortia partners in these blocks are British Gas (BG), Oil India Ltd. (OIL), Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (GSPC), Gas Authority India Ltd. (GAIL), National Thermal Power Corporation Ltd. (NTPC) and Andhra Pradesh Gas Infrastructure Corporation (APGIC),” the statement said.

In shallow waters, ONGC submitted 7 bids and won 6 out of them, in offshore areas of Kutch, Cauvery and Krishna-Godavari. OIL is the operator for Cauvery block, while in the other 5 blocks ONGC is the operator.

For the onland blocks, ONGC had submitted bid for 11 blocks and won 4 blocks; 3 as Operator and 1 as consortia member where OIL is the operator.

In addition, ONGC had also submitted bids for 3 CBM blocks offered under the CBM-IV round but none of the blocks were awarded to ONGC. In the past, ONGC has won almost 50 per cent of the awarded blocks.