ONGC officers ask PM to stall Oil Min’s move

The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited’s (ONGC) officers association has sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention to stall the Oil Ministry's plan to sell the company's producing oil and gas fields, saying the move has highly damaging implications for the country.

The Association of Scientific & Technical Officers (ASTO) cited examples of falling production at the western offshore Panna/Mukta fields that were privatised in the 1990s, and Reliance Industries Ltd's (RIL) flagging KG-D6 fields to state that ONGC has done well with its ageing fields. Most oil and gas fields of ONGC have been in production for 30 years and output has naturally shown a dip from the peak level, but still accounts for the bulk of domestic output, ASTO president Sanjay Goel wrote to Modi on November 23. India’s Oil Ministry has identified 15 producing oil and gas fields of ONGC and Oil India Ltd (OIL) for handing over to private firms on the premise of raising output. The fields have in-place reserve of 791.2 million tonnes of crude oil, and 333.46 billion cubic metres of gas. The production trajectory at Panna-Mukta field, which was taken away from ONGC and privatised, has been on a continuous decline, Goel wrote. "In fact, from 2009-10, production from the asset has dropped by close to 60 per cent," he wrote. Also, the Ratna-R Series fields which were given to Essar Oil could not be brought to production in two decades and have now been reverted to ONGC.

"This clearly shows privatisation alone is not a sufficient condition for augmenting output from any hydrocarbon property," he wrote. He said if stagnant or flagging production is a criterion for identifying underperforming fields of ONGC, the same yardstick must be extended to all domestic fields.