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India's oil reserves to be reassessed
By agencies
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Wednesday, 22 June 2005, 19:30 IST
NEW DELHI: The directorate-general of hydrocarbons is planning to reassess India's hydrocarbon potential. India has prognostic oil and gas reserves of about 30 billion tons but related studies were conducted about a decade ago.
Director General of Hydrocarbons VK Sibal said only 25 percent of these reserves had been discovered.
"We are thinking of the methodology and ways of integrating data from various companies," he said adding that in other countries, such studies were carried out every second year. Most of these studies had been conducted by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and Oil India in the past.
He said only seven to eight basins out of 26 had been explored so far. Besides, many onland basins remain unexplored, and deepwater explorations were also fairly new to the country.
The government offered 20 blocks for bidding under the fifth round of the new exploration and licensing policy. These blocks are in 12 sedimentary basins, covering an area of about 1,09,210 square meters.
DGH also plans to conduct a HSE audit and inspection of installations related to oil and gas exploration. DGH has developed guidelines on assessing the HSE management system. This is based on the current practices of auditing the system worldwide in upstream oil and gas industry.
DGH will be engaging external agencies for carrying out the audit. The selected agency will interact with DGH to finalize the schedule of audit, and be conversant with the operations at various sites being audited.
The DGH plans to simultaneously carry out audits of the existing exploration work being carried out in the country. The auditors will inspect whether contractors are maintaining proper books of accounts for all transactions pertaining to the production-sharing contracts.
The auditors will also inspect whether royalty, cess, license fee, profit petroleum and other statutory payments have been correctly determined and paid on time to the government.