Oil Ministry to launch second round of small field auction in 2017-18

As a first step towards shifting to new regime, a national data policy will be announced in a month

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas is set to come up with second round of discovered small and marginal fields auction in 2017-18.

"We have decided to come up with round two of discovered smalland marginal fields (DSF) in 2017-18," said Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on the sidelines of a Federation of Indian Petroleum Industry (FIPI) summit in Delhi today. This comes at a time when India had a soft launch of the open acreage licensing policy for oil and gas exploration, allowing bidders to carve out areas where they want to drill as the energy-hungry country looks at greater foreign investment to boost output. Pradhan also added that the government is set to come up with a policy on Enhanced Oil Recovery (EoR) soon

As an initial step towards shifting to the new regime, a national data policy will be announced within a month. This will be followed by opening up of a national data repository (NDR) within six months that will have seismic data. Under the policy, companies exploring hydrocarbons will get the choice to select their own exploration block, without waiting for a formal bidding round from the government. OALP will work under Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) that will give the investors much freedom in pricing and marketing for crude oil and natural gas.