ONGC lost focus in past years: Sarraf

State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), which has seen output decline year after year, had lost its focus from its core activities, its Chairman and Managing Director Dinesh K Sarraf said today.
"At some places, we got de-focused. Exploration and production (of oil and gas) is our main stay. We need to stay in E&P," he said at the Urja Sangam Conference here.
ONGC, which has seen its oil production drop 2 per cent every year for the past seven years, had diversified into downstream activities of petrochemicals, refining and LNG business over the past one decade.
Sarraf, who became the head of ONGC in March 2014, said the decline of the past seven years is now being arrested. "In 2014-15, we will have static overall production, while the same from offshore fields will rise 5-6 per cent."

"There has been demand, demand for performance from the new government because of that during last one year we have approve 5 major projects in western offshore totaling an investment of Rs 27,000-28,000 crore," he said.
Next month, the company will take to its board the biggest single location investment when it formalises the development plan for gas discoveries in the eastern offshore block KG-DWN-98/2, which sits next to Reliance Industries' KG-D6 block in Krishna Godavari basin.

"This will be the highest investment at a single location," he said without giving details.
The project as also others in western offshore will help raise company's natural gas production by 81 per cent to 100 million standard cubic meters per day by 2019-20, he said.

"Monitoring (by the ministy) is there, support is there and so results would come," he said.
BP India head Shashi Mukundan said all countries at early stage used the production sharing contract (PSC) model, that guarantee return of investment from hydrocarbon produced, to provide a fair balance between risk and reward.
There should be "no gap between the vision and implementation," he said adding there should be clarity of roles and responsibilities in approvals and regulations.
Companies and government, he said, should join up because the goal for two is the same - producing every molecule of oil or gas.