No shale gas auction in command area: CIL

KOLKATA: State-owned Coal India ( CIL) will not allow the government to auction shale gas blocks in its command area, its chairman S Narsing Rao said. This takes away substantial portion of shale gas reserves in Damodar basin, Bengal basin and in the Assam-Arakan basin that the petroleum ministry is planning to auction later this year. “We have decided to explore and extract shale gas in our command area by ourselves or in JV with companies we select.

At CIL, we do not want those blocks to be auctioned by the government to any other party. CIL, in conjunction with the ministry of coal, will object in case the government auctions such blocks under our command areas,” Rao said. A senior CIL official, however , said, “The government is, in fact, planning to auction only those blocks which fall outside the jurisdiction of CIL.

Blocks that hold coal as well as shale gas will not be auctioned, this is expected to leave out large reserves of the gas.” An initial integrated study suggested the presence of shale gas resource of about 48 trillion cubic feet in Damodar basin, of which about 10 trillion cubic feet could be technically recoverable. Initial studies show that many shale reserves in well explored basins are found to be promising.