NEW DELHI,NOV 11:
The government is mulling selling as many as 149 small and marginal oil and gas fields of ONGC to private and foreign companies and allow the state-owned firm to focus only on big fields, sources with knowledge of the development said.
On the anvil is some kind of extension of the Discovered Small Field (DSF) bid round where discovered and producing fields of Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) are auctioned to firms offering the maximum share of output to the government, sources said.
This is the second attempt by the oil ministry to take away some of the fields of ONGC for private and foreign companies.
In October last year, the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) had identified 15 producing fields with collective reserve of 791.2 million tonnes of crude oil and 333.46 billion cubic meters of gas of national oil companies for handing over to private firms in the hope that they would improve upon the baseline estimate and its extraction.
The plan, however, could not go through as ONGC strongly countered the DGH proposal with its own suggestion that it be allowed to outsource operations on same terms as the government plan.
Sources said the current plan started as a follow up of the October 12 meeting called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to review domestic production profile of oil and gas and the roadmap for cutting import dependence by 10 per cent by 2022.At a meeting, the ministry made a presentation showing that while 95 per cent of ONGC’s production was from 60 large fields, 149 smaller fields contributed to a mere five per cent.
