| "We are in talks with the petroleum ministry on extending exploration agreements from the third and fourth rounds of auctions," Director General of Hydrocarbons V K Sibal said yesterday. |
| "We don't plan to suspend any contracts," Sibal said in an interview. |
| The shortage of rigs is delaying drilling in existing fields, hampering a quest to cut dependence on imports. The country's annual offer for oil and gas fields has been delayed till August from March, he said. India had planned to offer 80 blocks in the auction this year, Sibal added. |
| Explorers, including Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Reliance Industries Ltd and Eni SpA, have drilled less than a 10th of the 880 wells agreed under exploration licences awarded by the government since 2000. |
| India's oil purchases last year made up about 29 per cent of imports, contributing to a record $57 billion trade deficit in the year ending March 2007. The government has asked operators to share equipment to hasten discoveries that would reduce reliance on oil imports. |
| "India will be among the countries having the biggest number of outstanding drilling commitments," Tor Gunnar Gloppen, chief operating officer of Rig Management Norway AS, said on May 23. |
| Reliance, ONGC and Italy's biggest oil company Eni have agreed to share drilling equipment and will advertise to jointly hire rigs and seismic equipment for projects on India's east coast, according to Sibal. |
| Canadian firm Canoro Resources Ltd, Premier Oil Plc and Oil India Ltd were cooperating in the north east region while a group, including ONGC and Reliance, was being formed for projects on the west coast, Sibal said. Indian operators and the regulator funded a $100,000 study by Rig Management on sharing exploration services. |
| "We are trying to arrange rigs which will move from one operator to another and this may be cheaper," D K Pandey, exploration director, ONGC, said in an interview on May 17. |
| "We have to sort out scheduling for individual operators." |
| Sharing resources will enable companies to reduce costs. The cost of renting rigs has tripled since 2005. |
| Transocean Inc, the world's largest offshore oil and gas driller, said on May 2 that surging demand for rigs had enabled the company to book orders worth $21.4 billion at the end of March for projects extending as far as 2015. |
| "The market is very bullish, both on the onshore and the offshore sectors," VK Agarwal, head of Essar group's rig business, said on May 17. "People are not getting rigs." |
| The company, which owns 14 rigs, leased a deepwater rig to Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation last month for about $340,000 a day. |
| Reliance is paying $320,000 a day until August 2008 to rent the Deepwater Frontier, more than twice the rate Transocean charged an earlier client, according to Transocean's website. The tariff will rise to $477,000 a day, when Reliance extends the contract in 2008 for another three years. |
| Explorers in Norway, the North Sea, West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico had accelerated drilling plans and reduced costs at deep-sea ventures by sharing rigs, said Rig Management's Gloppen. |
| "India is very fast in offering acreages," said Ian Blakeley, a manager responsible for India at IHS Inc, an oil services provider. "The operators are slower in exploration." |
| Gujarat State Petroleum, which said in 2005 that it made India's biggest gas discovery with estimated reserves of 20 trillion cubic feet, had not met half of its drilling commitments after two extensions, the company's partner in the field, Geoglobal Inc, said in its annual report. |
| The shortage of offshore services might delay production to "later 2008" at Reliance Industries' gas development in Krishna-Godavari basin, Tristone Capital Ltd, an energy investment bank, said on March 8 in a report about Canadian explorer Niko Resources Ltd, Reliance's partner in the field. |
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