With an eye towards making India’s sedimentary database robust and authentic, the ministry of petroleum and natural gas has decided to come out with a new policy on seismic surveys in the next two to three weeks.
Oil minister M Veerappa Moily said the ministry is taking several steps to win back exploration and production (E&P) operators’ confidence in the Indian oil and gas story and this is one of those steps.
In fact, the ministry is also working on preparing a national repository of geological E&P data that can be made available to investors interested in the Indian hydrocarbon space.
On the seismic survey, Vivek Rae, secretary, oil ministry, said the Centre is working on a new policy that will allow private surveyors to come and do speculative surveys and create data packs that can be sold to the interested oil and gas players investing in India.
?We already had a policy on this where they came and prepared data and sold. This was under a profit-sharing model which ran into some trouble and then was stopped. But now this new policy will help the companies to accelerate the survey work and we hope that the policy will be kick-started in the next two three weeks,? he said. He said this policy has to be approved by both the oil ministry and the finance ministry first, which should be achieved in 2-3 weeks’ time.
On the national sedimentary database, Rae said a tender has been floated.
The work will be awarded by December end and in the next 18 months, the database will be ready. ?This is a medium-term solution… but it will at least help in allaying investors and operators’ fear,? he said.