DGH, Jt Secy to be govt nominees on oilfield oversight panels

Upstream regulator DGH and Joint Secretary (Exploration) in the Oil Ministry will be the government nominees on oversight committees that will monitor the 30 small discovered oil and gas fields awarded in the first round of auction.
The so-called Management Committees will also have representatives of the companies or consortiums that won the rights to produce from the fields, the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) said in a notice.
"The Management Committee will monitor different technical and contractual aspects of the Revenue Sharing Contract," it said.
Discovered Small Fields (DSF) Bid Round 2016 was launched on May 25, 2016, with the objective to bring idle discovered small fields of state-owned ONGC and OIL to production at the earliest.

Of the 46 fields offered for bidding in the round, contracts for 30 fields (23 onshore and 7 offshore) were signed on March 27, 2017.
"In accordance with the provision of the contract, the process for granting Petroleum Mining Lease (PML) has started and till now 11 mining lease in onshore and 7 in offshore have been granted and remaining are in advanced stage of approval," the DGH said in the notice.

The Effective Date of the 18 Contract Areas (7 Offshore and 11 Onshore) has commenced from the date of PML grant/ transfer.
The ministry, it said, has nominated "Director General (DGH) as the Chairman and first Government nominee and Joint Secretary (Exploration), Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas as Deputy Chairman and 2nd Government nominee for the constitution of Management Committee."

In all, 46 idle fields, which were taken away from state- owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and Oil India Ltd (OIL), were put on bidding in DSF-I, the first bid round in more than six years. A total of 34 of them received bids.
Of these, 31 bids were approved but one of the awardees did not take up the offer and so contracts for only 30 fields were signed.
Touted as an auction round that would replicate the shale gas revolution of the US, half of the fields went to new and lesser known entrants like engineering company Megha Engineering and Infrastructure, KEI-RSOS Petroleum, Enquest Drilling and Nippon Power.

These fields, which hold in-place reserves of 62 million tonnes of oil and oil equivalent gas, can cumulatively produce a peak of around 15,000 barrels of oil per day and 2 million standard cubic metres per day of gas, according to DGH.
The peak oil and gas output envisaged is about 2 per cent of India's current oil and gas production.