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    Oil India bags 12 exploration licenses in latest oilfield auction

    Synopsis

    ONGC won 9 of the 20 bids it had placed. Vedanta won third of the 30 bids it made, the highest number of bids by any participant in these two rounds.

    Untitled-6Agencies
    Oil India secured 12 wins with just 15 bids --the best strike rate among bidders.
    New Delhi: State-run Oil India has won 12 exploration licenses, the highest in the latest rounds of oilfield auction, ahead of Vedanta’s 10 and ONGC’s eight.

    Indian Oil and the joint venture of Reliance Industries and BP also won one block each, according to the list of winners published by the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH), the technical arm of the Oil Ministry which conducted the second and third rounds of auction under the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP).

    The government had received 75 bids for 37 blocks offered in the second and third licensing rounds that ran almost concurrently. In the second round, 14 blocks attracted 33 bids while in the third round, 23 blocks received 42 bids. Five coal bed methane blocks offered in the third round attracted no interest.

    Oil India secured 12 wins with just 15 bids --the best strike rate among bidders. ONGC won 9 of the 20 bids it had placed. Vedanta won third of the 30 bids it made, the highest number of bids by any participant in these two rounds.

    Capture

    RIL-BP combine, which had placed its maiden bid for the Indian exploration license in the second round, won the only bid it made. RIL had last made a bid for exploration block in 2010 under the older exploration policy.

    In the first auction round under OALP, Vednata had bid for all 55 blocks on offer and won 41.

    Under the OALP, companies are free to carve their own blocks and submit expressions of interest (EoI) for those blocks to the government in two half-yearly cycles ending on May 15 and November 15 every year. At the end of each cycle, the government aggregates these blocks and auctions them. Sometimes, the government offers some blocks on its own.
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    ( Originally published on Jul 02, 2019 )
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