New Delhi, Dec 21: Continuing the pursuit of a proactive agenda for hydrocarbons exploration and in sync with the prescribed timelines, the Government has launched the seventh round of bids for the Open Acreage Licensing Program (OALP) to international competitive participation.
The bids can be submitted through a dedicated online e-bidding portal till 1200 hours on 15 February 2022.
A successful award of the Round-VII blocks, likely be completed by the end of March 2022, would add further 15,766 square km of exploration acreage increasing the cumulative acreage under OALP 207,692 sq. km. The OALP Round VII is expected to generate immediate exploration work commitment of around USD 300-400 million.
Since the launch of the Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) approved in March 2016, five rounds of OALP have been concluded for 105 E&P blocks and 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 6 sedimentary basins. These include five onland blocks, of which four are in category-I basins and one is in category-III basin. There are two shallow water blocks, both of which are in category-I basin) and one ultra deep water block in category-I basin.
The Government has been scaling up HELP to reduce India’s import dependency of oil and gas and accelerate exploration and production activities. Further policy reforms were notified in the exploration and licensing policy in February 2019 which also shifted the focus from revenue to production maximization with continued focus on greater transparency and streamlined procedures. To improve the ‘ease of doing business’ in the E&P sector, the policy tweak while adopting the revenue sharing contract model, now comes with attractive and liberal terms like reduced royalty rates, no oil cess, marketing and pricing freedom, round the year bidding and freedom to investors for carving out blocks of their interest.
The policy offers single license to cover both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon resources and exploration permission during the entire contract period. The window for submission of Expressions of Interest (EoIs) is currently open till March 31, 2022.
