“These areas were discovered long back but these discoveries could not be monetized due to various reasons such as isolated locations, small size of reserves, high development costs, technological constraints, fiscal regime etc.,” says India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
“It is expected that in-place locked hydrocarbons volume of 40 MMT oil and 22.0 BCM of gas will be monetized over a period of 15 years. The production from these contract areas will supplement the domestic production,” says government.
Indian government has initiated several programs to reduce oil imports as much as 10% by year 2022. India economy imports more than 80 percent of its crude requirement. Indian government has started working on five pronged strategy to ensure energy security namely- lowering the requirement of energy, substituting existing fuels with alternatives, expanding the domestic energy resource base through unconventional sources like shale gas/oil and gas hydrates, maintaining strategic reserve oil imports, acquiring energy assets abroad.
Recently, Indian government had proposed to merge government owned oil companies to create an integrated public sector “Oil Major” which will be able to match the performance of international and domestic private sector oil and gas companies. India has also announced two more strategic reserve site for oil apart from three others already operational site in different locations in India.
