Comments
The public sector oil exploration and production major, ONGC, is consciously expediting exploration in areas that it was given on ‘nomination basis’ — acreages not won through a competitive bidding process.
The company’s medium-term perspective plan speaks of ‘expeditious conversion of nomination ‘petroleum exploration licences’ into ‘mining lease’.
The hurry is because the validity of these licences will expire in 2014. If ONGC does not do anything in these areas, it runs the risk of these blocks being taken away from it and given to other oil exploration and production companies.
It is learnt that ONGC has 28 ‘nomination exploration licences’.
An ONGC source said the company has been trying to speed up the process of conversion of petroleum exploration licences into mining leases in recent years. Three years back, ONGC had 228 MLs, the source said. Today, it has 340, with a total area of 30,758 sq. km.
On the BSE today, the ONGC share (of face value of Rs 5) opened at Rs 279.20.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.