₹1-lakh crore of oil, gas resources on offer in small fields auction round-II

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has launched the second Discovered Small Field bid round.

Under this round, 25 contract areas, covering 59 discovered oil and gas fields, spread over 3,000 sq km having currently known in-place volumes of 190 million tonne of 1.4 billion barrels of oil and oil equivalent gas have been put on offer.

Speaking at the launch, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan, said, “Last time (Round 1) we had aimed to auction 86 million tonne of oil equivalent reserves, but we managed to award 45 million tonne. This time we have pushed for auctioning larger acreages with resources worth over ₹1 lakh crore.”

Of the 25 contract areas on offer this time, 15 are on land and 10 are shallow water. The maximum in-place reserves on offer are in the Mumbai offshore basin with 97.6 million tonne of oil equivalent (mtoe) reserves. The KG Offshore basin comes second with 55.3 mtoe in-place reserves.

“The anticipated government revenue from the fields awarded during the previous round of Discovered Small Field auctions is around ₹9,000 crore. During this round, if all fields are bid out, there is a scope of ₹45,000 crore being accrued to the government coffers,” he added.

Pradhan also said a higher price of crude oil will boost prospects of the blocks that are being offered. He said, “During the DSF 1 round, the viability of the fields was assessed with the price of crude oil around $45 a barrel. At the present price of crude oil, the fields on offer under the DSF II round are a low hanging fruit in India’s energy basket.”

The bids will be called from September to December and awarded in January next.

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