Sixth round of bidding for oil, gas blocks in Jan

The government will start the sixth round of bidding under the new exploration and licensing policy (NELP) in January. The ministry of petroleum has begun an exercise to review the existing provisions of NELP.

As part of this Petroleum Federation of India, a representative body of the petroleum industry, along with PricewaterhouseCoopers, today presented a paper on the exploration and production policy.

The paper suggested a transition to the open acreage licensing system where the government invites inputs from companies on quarterly basis for identification of blocks. "Such blocks may be announced for others to express interest and awarded quarterly on competitive basis," said the paper.

During the discussions that followed, participants stressed the need for a creation of national data repository. While there were views expressed in favour of allowing proprietary over processed data, there were general consensus on raw data being made available to all.

The PwC paper also underlined the need to have a data repository to attract investors. This it felt could be a step in the direction of introducing an open acreage policy. To ramp up exploration actitivity, it is necessary to remove barriers in getting data for evaluation and not make them wait for NELP rounds.

PwC said there should be different award terms and production sharing terms for different types of blocks-onland, frontier, deepwater, ultra-deepwater,shallow water and poorly explored.

Some industry representatives wanted ONGC to offer its discovered but non-producing fields to other players. PwC also suggested that small- and medium-discovered fields might be offered to companies with low risk appetite.

As far as changes in the NELP terms were concerned, the paper emphasised the need to encourage healthy competition and reduction in the number of clearances required.