Govt forms committee to look at selling of OIL & ONGC fields to private firms

Government of India forms the committee to look at the selling of OIL & ONGC fields to private firms: Details, Aim, Highlights

The Government of India has formed a six-member committee to look at selling as many as 149 small and marginal oil and gas fields of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and Oil India Ltd (OIL) to private and foreign companies to boost domestic output.

The Rajiv Kumar committee will be headed by NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar and includes Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha, Oil Secretary M M Kutty, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, and ONGC Chairman and Managing Director Shashi Shanker as members.

The Rajiv Kumar committee is follow up of October 2018 meeting called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to review domestic production profile of oil and gas and the roadmap for cutting import dependence by 10% by 2022.

In this meeting, Union Oil Ministry had made a presentation showing that 149 smaller fields of ONGC, OIL and other explorers accounted for just 5% of domestic crude oil production.

It was suggested at the meeting that these smaller fields could be given out to private and foreign firms so that ONGC could concentrate on big ones where it could rope in technology partners through production enhancement contracts (PEC) or technical service arrangements.

This was mainly large ONGC fields as contribute to 95% of its production and leave out the rest for private firms.