India offers 15,766 sq. km of exploration acreage
The Government is expecting a commitment of US$300-$400 million through Open Acreage Licensing Programme (OALP) Bid Round-VII for International Competitive Bidding, e-bidding deadline for which is till 1200 hrs on 15 Feb 2022 and award of blocks is likely to be end of March 2022.
The bidding documents and details of this bid round are available on https://online.dghindia.org/oalp.
Successful award of Round-VII Blocks would add further 15,766 sq. km of exploration acreage and cumulative acreage under OALP will be increased to 207,692 sq km, said the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas on 21 Dec 2021.
Since the launch of Hydrocarbon Exploration & Licensing Policy (HELP) on 30 March 2016, five rounds of OALP have been concluded for 105 E&P blocks. Award of 21 blocks under sixth round of OALP is under progress.
These 126 blocks comprise about 191,926 sq km of area spread across 18 sedimentary basins.
Eight blocks under present bid round are spread across six Sedimentary Basins and include five Onshore blocks (four in Category-I Basins and one in Category-III Basin), two shallow Water blocks (both in Category-I Basin) and one Ultra Deep Water block (Category-I Basin).
HELP, a Revenue Sharing Contract model, is a significant step towards improving the ‘Ease of Doing Business’ in the Indian Exploration and Production (E&P) sector.
It comes with attractive and liberal terms like reduced royalty rates, no Oil Cess, marketing and pricing freedom, round the year bidding, freedom to investors for carving out blocks of their interest, a single license to cover both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon resources, exploration permission during the entire contract period, and an easy, transparent and swift bidding and awarding process.
The XIIth window for submission of Expressions of Interest (EoIs) is currently open till 31 March 2022. fiinews.com
