No compromise on commitments in RIL block: Govt

With Reliance Industries ‘failing’ to meet contractual timelines, the Oil Ministry on Wednesday indicated that it will not compromise on legal commitments in the quest for early monetisation of the gas discoveries.

RIL had not met various timelines in case of eight gas discoveries with an estimated 1.15 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in the eastern offshore KG-D6 block. The same are now part of the area that oil regulator DGH wants the company to contractually relinquish so that it can be auctioned.

“This is a complicated issue... As government, we want to monetise all the gas available in the system and bring it out. Instead of importing (gas) at $14, we should bring it out as quickly as possible.

“But you have to do it within legal framework. It is not a system where you can do anything you feel like. There is a production sharing contract (PSC) which decides and determines and defines how you do it,” Oil Secretary Vivek Rae said, after a meeting with RIL and its partners BP plc of UK and Canada’s Niko Resources.

Rae said the Ministry faced two challenges - monetise discoveries and adhere to the PSC. “That is what we are trying to reconcile.”

The government will soon decide if RIL should relinquish certain areas as per contract or it be given permission to go ahead with development of the find, he said.

RIL had not done the prescribed tests to confirm three gas finds while it failed to meet the PSC timelines for submission of investment plans for five years.

These eight discoveries are part of the 6,601 square kilometres out of the total 7,645 sq km area in the KG-D6 block that DGH wants the company to give up on the grounds that the time line to develop the fields had expired.

RIL says DGH was acting in an arbitrary manner as globally drill-stem test (DST) is not done to confirm a discovery and the regulator had found five finds commercially unviable at the current price of $4.2 per million British thermal unit.

Rae said it cannot give a timeline for deciding on the issue however added that “we want to do it as quickly as possible.”