55 blocks of oil, gas for bids by March

India plans to offer 55 oil and gas blocks for bidding under the New Exploration and Licensing Policy (Phase-VI) by the month end.

The government has relaxed some bidding conditions, which will allow more domestic companies to compete in the round.

It is also believed that the government has now halved the required experience for bidding for highly prospective deep-sea blocks to five years. In addition, the discovery benchmark, fixed at three years earlier, is now being stretched to five.

Of the 55 blocks to be offered, 24 would be deep-sea, 6 shallow offshore and 25 onland. Bidding opens on February 28 and closes on September 15.

The 10-year experience clause in the proposed bidding criteria would have disqualified all the major domestic companies like Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC).

The reserve accretion through acquisitions requirement had also been removed, sources said.

Global majors are more active in mergers and acquisitions and would have earned more points for the reserves they bought rather than explored.

The technical criteria has also been changed. Under NELP-VI, proven technical competence of an operator will be given higher weighting.

Under the new norms, 15 points will be given for technical capability of proposed operators in case of onland and shallow water blocks and 20 points in case of deepwater blocks.

Roadshows for the NELP-VI round are to be held in Delhi (March 10), London (March 20), Houston (March 23), Perth (March 20-31), Kuala Lumpur (April 5-6), Singapore (April 7), Doha (April 22), Dubai (April 23-24), Calgary (June 14-15) and Rio (June 19-20).

The absence of big global names in the earlier rounds due to aggressive bidding by ONGC and Reliance, had prompted the then petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar to suggest technical criteria that laid heavy emphasis on experience of the bidder and previous discoveries.

ONGC and Reliance, India's only firms with deep-sea operator experience, ventured into the highly-risky deepwater in 2000.

Compared to this, multinationals like British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, British Gas and Petrobras have been in the business for a much longer period and have made discoveries in the recent past in various acerages spanning the globe.