India’s state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) will invest $4 billion to intensify its exploration efforts over the next three years.
The country’s top explorer said it would invest funds for acquiring seismic survey and drilling of 115-120 wells every year to “probe around 1700 million tonnes of oil and oil equivalent gas of yet to find reserves”.
India, the world’s third biggest oil importer and consumer, ships in over 80% of its oil needs. Asia’s third-largest economy wants to monetise its oil and gas resources to cut its import bill.
“ONGC also plans to leverage international collaborations with … global majors for this, for which talks are in an advanced stage,” it said.
The company is also offering a stake to global oil companies to help develop its challenging fields off the country’s east coast.
ONGC is one of several Indian operators that have upstream investments in Russia, which could be impaired by sanctions over the Ukraine war.
“Import bans and international sanctions on Russia may constrain the future cash flow-generating capacity of these assets and lead to impairment losses for the companies,” Moody’s analysts Sweta Patodia and Vikas Halan said in a note.
“However, the Indian companies have not announced an exit from their Russian investments and therefore an immediate impairment in the value of investments will be limited, especially under the current oil price environment.”
- Reuters, with additional editing by George Russell
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