Government-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has made fewer new discoveries and acquired

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only one single oil asset abroad in the present financial year compared with what it achieved in 2008-09.

The Maharatna upstream oil enterprise made 28 new domestic discoveries in 2008-09. But, this number fell to just 15 in the present financial year.

When asked the reason, RS Sharma, chairman and MD, ONGC said that exploration phenomenon is a huge task and it cannot be explained in couple of lines.

“It has been our endeavour to bring new discoveries to production at the earliest,” Sharma said. He said that ONGC was focusing on expeditious monetisation of marginal fields. “In the next two years, G-1 field in the East coast, eight B and C series fields in the West coast will be brought to stream. These fields will be producing about 42 million tonnes of oil and oil equivalent in a span of 15 years,” he said.

ONGC’s crude production in the first nine months of the present financial year has also dipped to 19.89 million metric tonnes (mmt) compared to 20.57 mmt in the same period the previous year.

The dip in production is due to ageing fields but ONGC has implemented high-tech improved oil recovery (IOR) and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) schemes to reduce the dip in production, Deepak Pareek, an analyst at Angel Broking said.

However, Deepak Mahurkar, associate director (oil and gas practice) of PricewaterhouseCoopers feels production will go up in the last quarter of the financial year. “They have set a higher target this year, which should be met in the last three months,” Mahurkar said.

Meanwhile, ONGC Videsh (OVL) has added only one big size project till now in the current fiscal year. An international consortium of OVL will develop a multi-billion integrated oil project in Orinoco heavy oil belt in eastern Venezuela.

The company is more focussed in Imperial Energy, which it had taken over in 2008. Also, it is working to bring new assets into stream rather than hunting for acquiring fields, said Pareek.

The country’s largest public enterprise has plans to invest up to $30 billion over the next 10 years to buy developed assets overseas. It has set a target to obtain 20 million metric tonnes of oil and oil-equivalent gas per year, or 402,000 barrels a day, from overseas assets by 2020.

At present, OVL has close to 39 projects spread over 15 countries.