The government will focus more keenly on ‘oil diplomacy’ and leverage its position as a big-time oil importer while brokering new oil deals abroad, said Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, on Friday.
The government is considering buying oil and gas assets abroad, Pradhan added, particularly in Africa and South America. India currently imports 77 per cent of its crude oil needs. The Modi government has a set a target of reducing the total import requirement by 10 per cent by 2022.
At current lower levels of crude oil prices, the environment has changed into a buyer’s market.
“We’re buying so much crude oil,” he said, “that we need to look at what we will get in return.”
While the government would keep away from the deal-making process, Pradhan said he would encourage public sector explorers, particularly ONGC’s foreign arm ONGC Videsh, in striking new deals.
Regarding ONGC’s investment in the Farzad-B gas block in Iran, which Iran had threatened to re-auction, he said a high-level government delegation has met with Iranian officials.
India will increase its “active engagement” with the block, the Minister added.
On exploration within India, Pradhan declined to set a timeline for the tenth new exploration and licensing policy (NELP – X) to be announced.
The experience with the previous rounds of NELP has been mixed, he said, and the new policy has received approvals from the Union Cabinet on removing bottlenecks.
He declined to give details about the policy but said that it would focus on creating the right “economics” (regarding a contentious revenue-sharing clause), acreage (which will allow for bidding of blocks through a national data repository) and a uniform licensing policy (a single policy for production of oil, gas and shale).