Govt may replace NELP with OALP

NEW DELHI: India plans to phase out the annual auctioning of oil and gas exploration blocks under the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) in favour of an Open Acreage Licensing System (OALP) that will allow energy firms to bid for such blocks anytime of the year, a senior oil ministry official said.

���India is moving gradually, but inexorably towards OALP from the current NELP,��� minister of state for petroleum and natural gas Jitin Prasada said at an industry conference.

Mr Prasada said, OALP will enable bidders to bid for blocks on offer any time of the year unlike Nelp which is an annual event. ���Data for these blocks will be made available to the bidders through the National Data Repository (NDR),��� he said.

India���s upstream regulator Directorate General of Hydrocarbon is in the process of setting up an NDR to collect and preserve valuable data related to the Indian sedimentary basins which will be used by energy exploration firms in discovering hydrocarbon assets.

���NDR is expected to play a much larger and significant role in the exploration & production (E&P) scenario in the years to come,��� he said.

There are various organisations in India that acquire geoscientific data. This includes data not only for petroleum exploration and development but also for other minerals. ���It is very important that this data, which is acquired through great effort and at huge expenditure, is properly preserved, easily accessible and gainfully shared for national development,��� he said.

He said NDR and the use of latest technologies are a must to explore oil and gas domestically. ���We are endowed with about 138 billion barrels of oil and oil equivalent of gas, but these are yet to be found resources .... So, in order to search and exploit these resources, the exploitation technologies also need to be innovative,��� he said.

Currently, over 70 E&P companies are working in India after the introduction of NELP about 10 years ago, Mr Prasada said.