Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Dec 21, 2005
Online edition of India's National Newspaper Wednesday, Dec 21, 2005 |
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NEW DELHI: The Petroleum Ministry, in a note to the Prime Minister, has cautioned the Government about the new trend among public sector oil companies of entering into diversification and buying overseas properties, using their windfall profits earned from their domestic operations. The Ministry would like Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) to concentrate on domestic exploration by taking advantage of additional resources in the past three to four years, the note said. "ONGC must work for improved efficiency parameters, forging partnerships with international majors and a huge increase in indigenous R&D in collaboration with international knowledge centres and better networking with other Indian knowledge centres to achieve the objective of higher energy security and vision of the National Common Minimum programme,'' the Ministry has said. The steep increase in revenues of oil PSUs, it said, has led to no particular rise in their efficiency or output but almost entirely owing to our progressively shifting to a system of international parity prices four years ago,'' the Ministry said. The Ministry cautioned that the trend, set up by ONGC, is spreading in the petroleum sector with oil majors keen to divert their investible resources to overseas acquisitions. "ONGC had already invested twice as much in overseas exploration as in domestic exploration,'' the note said. It was interesting to note that overseas companies were beginning to look at the "potential of India'' as only 20 per cent of hydrocarbon basins has been surveyed. Charging ONGC's management with diverting funds to ambitious integration projects which extend far downstream and branch out of hydrocarbons into other sectors, the Petroleum Ministry said the corporation had low success ratio. The Ministry said that ONGC was coming around to sharing the Ministry's vision and after months of prodding, ONGC was at long last engaged in producing "Framework 2008,'' designed to arrest the projected decline in output over the next few years. The document was still to be evaluated. "The key focus of energy security must be on vastly augmenting investment in domestic exploration, primarily by ONGC, which accounts for over 80 per cent of current output, supplemented, of course, by growing and diversified private and international investment,'' the note said "To this end, the main requirement is expeditiously completing detailed seismic surveys of our 26 sedimentary basins,'' it said. — UNI
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