New policy on anvil for gas block auction

India will have a new policy to auction hydrocarbon assets for exploring oil and gas reserves — Open Acreage Licensing Policy (Oalp) — in 18 months from now.

“We should be able to launch our first Oalp in 18 months from now, when the national data repository would be ready with relevant data. We opened the tenders for the repository just two days ago. The arrival of hardware, software and its initialisation will take some time,” Director General of Hydrocarbons S K Srivastava told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Mumbai.

The new policy, an open acreage system, will be beneficial for the industry, as oil and gas blocks will be on offer through the year and not based on rounds, against the existing regime of the New Exploration and Licensing Policy (Nelp).

In the existing regime, only a limited number of oil and gas blocks are identified and offered for bidding to domestic and global energy companies. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has so far completed eight editions of Nelp.

In Oalp, a database of all such blocks that the government plans to offer for bidding will be made available in the public domain. Any company that wishes to bid for a particular block can do so anytime during the year.

“The Oalp system for auctioning oil and gas acreages is supposed to be more investor-friendly, compared to the present Nelp rounds, which are held once a year. Under the Oalp regime, bidders will get enough time to evaluate technical data, as it will be a continuous process,” said a Mumbai-based analyst.

India’s latest round of auctions of oil exploration blocks, held in October 2009, received 76 bids for 36 of the 70 blocks on offer. The total committed investment during the eighth round was to the tune of $1.34 billion.