ONGC in talks for Gujarat State Petroleum Corp asset

To take another 11% stake in Russia's Vankor

State-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has confirmed it is in talks to acquire a certain portion of the oil and gas assets of Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation in the Krishna-Godavari basin, off the Andhra coast.

Also, that that its foreign operations arm, ONGC Videsh (OVL), is in advance stages of talks for acquiring another 11 per cent stake in the Vankor-Cluster asset in Russia's eastern Siberia, owned by Rosneft. The deal might take OVL’s  overall stake in Vankor to 26 per cent; it had bought 15 percent in the asset for $1.27 billion in September 2015.

“As far as GSPC is concerned, we are in talks to acquire a certain percentage of their field. We did a technical study in this regard through Houston-based Ryder Scott,” confirmed D K Sarraf, chairman and managing director, refusing to divulge more.

The talks are for a majority stake sale in GSPC’s Deen Dayal West (DDW) block. According to media reports, the expected reserves there are much less than the earlier estimate of 7.6 trillion cubic ft. The valuation was earlier pegged at $1.5 billion.

The deal might help GSPC to partially clear its debt of Rs 19,576 crore and in preparing for future exploration and development.

The plan on Vankor comes as a consortium of three state-run companies — Indian Oil Corporation, Oil India and Bharat Petro Resources — had announced the acquisition of 24 per cent stake in the same block, to be finalised by the end of this quarter. The consortium will be paying about $4 billion to acquire stake in the Taas-Yuryakhoil gas fields and the Vankor oil field.

“We are in the final stages of striking the deal. To finance it, we might first go for a bridge loan and later raise money through bonds to refinance this loan,” Oil India Chairman Utpal Bora told this newspaper in a recent interview. Vankor is the second largest oil field in Russia, with estimated reserves of 2,604 million barrels, plus 130 bn cubic metres of natural gas.  Production commenced in 2009 and the present oil production is 440,000 barrels a day, of which OVL’s share is 66,000 bopd.