New Delhi. Four bidders have participated in India’s biggest oil and gas bidding round. According to the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH), these include public sector Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and Oil India Ltd. (OIL) and private sector Vedanta Ltd. Only two bids were received for most blocks. Under the OALP-IX bidding round, 28 blocks or areas spread over 1.36 lakh square kilometers were offered for oil and gas exploration and production.
For the first time, Reliance Industries Limited-BP Plc has teamed up with ONGC to bid for a block in Gujarat. Reliance and its lead partner BP Plc had bid in only two of the last eight rounds of oil and gas bidding since 2017. The Reliance-BP alliance had won the two blocks it had bid for in the previous round. This is the first time they have teamed up with ONGC to bid for a shallow water block in the Gujarat-Saurashtra basin.
In the previous eighth round of the Open Area Licensing Policy (OALP-8), ONGC did not bid for the deepwater Krishna Godavari Basin block, for which the Reliance-BP alliance had shown interest. The DGH on Monday released the names of bidders for 28 blocks offered under the OALP-9 round, for which bidding closed on September 21.
ONGC bid for 14 blocks alone and four other blocks with partners like OIL and Indian Oil Corporation (IOC). Including the bid made jointly with Reliance-BP, ONGC bid for 19 of the 28 blocks on offer. Vedanta Ltd, owned by mining baron Anil Agarwal, bid for all 28 blocks on offer. Sun Petrochemicals Ltd bid for seven areas. Four of the 28 blocks on offer received three bids each, while the rest had two bidders, one of whom is Vedanta Ltd. The blocks are awarded to firms that offer the highest share of revenue generated from oil and gas produced from them.
