Reliance Industries and its British partner BP plc have made their first bid for an oil and gas exploration acreage in over eight years by bidding for one of the 32 blocks up for auction in latest licensing round that saw mining major Vedanta putting in as many as 30 bids while State-owned ONGC vying for 20.
Bidding for 14 blocks on offer in the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) round-II and another 18 oil and gas blocks and 5 coal-bed methane (CBM) blocks on offer in OALP-III closed on Wednesday.
Official sources said Vedanta, which had walked away with 41 out of the 55 blocks offered in OALP-I last year, bid for 30 areas.
Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) bid for 20 blocks while Oil India Ltd (OIL) bid for 16. Indian Oil Corp (IOC), GAIL (India) and SunPetro bid for two blocks each, they said.
RIL-BP made an offer for one block in the Krishna Godavari basin.
This is the first time that BP is bidding for an exploration acreage in the country. It had entered the country buying 30 per cent stake in RIL’s 21 oil and gas exploration blocks in 2011 for USD 7.2 billion. All but a couple of blocks have since been relinquished.
Mukesh Ambani-owned RIL had on its own bid for six blocks in the ninth round of New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) but did not win any block.
NELP has since been replaced by Hydrocarbon Exploration Licensing Policy (HELP) under which OALP bids round have been held.
Sources said the block RIL-BP bid for is the same which BP had demarcated during the expression of interest (EoI) stage.
India had in July 2017 allowed companies to carve out blocks of their choice with a view to bringing about 2.8 million sq km of unexplored area in the country under exploration.
Under this policy, called open acreage licensing policy or OALP, companies are allowed to put in an EoI for prospecting of oil and gas in any area that is presently not under any production or exploration licence.
The EoIs can be put in at any time of the year but they are accumulated twice
annually.
The blocks or areas that receive EoIs at the end of a cycle are put up for auction with the originator or the firm that originally selected the area getting a 5-mark advantage.
The two windows of accumulating EoIs end on May 15 and November 15 every year. EoIs accumulated till May 15 are supposed to be put on auction by June 30 and those in the second window by December 31.
BP made the EoI for a block in the window provided for OALP-II which closed on May 15, 2018. However the EoIs collected in this window were put on bidding only in January this year, a delay of six months.
A month later, the Government offered another 23 oil and gas blocks and CBM blocks in third round, for which EoIs accumulated by November 15, 2018.
Sources said OALP-II and OALP-III ran concurrently.
