The Hindu : Business : ONGC to roll out retail outlets next fiscal

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Wednesday, Feb 16, 2005

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Business

ONGC to roll out retail outlets next fiscal

By Our Special Correspondent

KOLKATA, FEB. 15. ONGC will begin rolling out its retail outlets by 2005-06, Chairman and Managing Director, Subir Raha, said. The outlets would be branded under the name Oval (ONGC values), Mr. Raha said.

Addressing a press conference here, he said that the public sector company was now working on brand positioning and would open the petroleum marketing outlets under its own licence as well as that of MRPL. "We have two separate licences for opening 1,600 outlets in total,'' he said.

He said that ONGC had no plans to divest its holding in either IOC or GAIL and was willing to buyback its own stake in IOC in case they were selling.

On the underground coal gasification project, he said that R& D work on this project was on and ONGC's likely partners for this project would be Coal India Ltd., Neyveli Lignite Corporation and Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation. "Once the agreements were in place we will decide where to launch the project,'' he said. This is a new technology that opens up the prospect of power generation from gas produced from coal.

Mr. Raha said that a consultant had been appointed for preparing a detailed feasibility report on ONGC's plans of setting up a petrochemical plant at Dahej in Gujarat and in Mangalore in Kerala. He said that both these projects would be dual feed plants based on naphtha and liquefied natural gas. These would be world scale plants, which typically require investments of about Rs. 5,000 crores each. Referring to ONGC's plans in Sundarbans in West Bengal, the ONGC chief said that the first well was expected to begin drilling by mid-March and commercial production would begin in 24 months from 2006 if ONGC's efforts were successful. The total cost of the project was estimated at Rs. 600 crores.

He said that ONGC was set to pick up a 26 per cent equity in the Tripura power project, which would be a joint venture with the State Government and the Infrastructure Leasing and Finance Corporation which would have a 50 per cent stake. Entry into this gas-based project would mark ONGC's entry into power generation. However Power Trading Corporation, Power Grid Corporation and other private sectors firms were also keen to join the project.

Mr. Raha also said that ONGC would keep up its offensive on its overseas projects and would bid for the Sakhalin III block in Russia with a partner.

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