Anisul Islam Noor :
The conducting of the multi-client seismic survey in the Bay of Bengal may be delayed for one year, as the Cabinet Economic Affairs Committee has not yet submitted its report, sources said.
The seismic survey is a long standing initiative of the Energy Division, since the settlement of maritime boundary with neighboring India and Myanmar, the project has remained pending for last six months with the high level review body.
Oil and gas exploration is a top priority project of the government to meet growing domestic demand. But the committee is delaying to summit its report, Energy Division sources said.
After missing this winter, the government has to wait for another winter to conduct survey.
Following the settlement of dispute, the state-owned Petrobangla invited a bid for awarding contract. Five international companies named TGS-Schlumberger JV, Geotrace Technologies, Dolphin Geophysical, BGP INC, China and DMNG Joint Stock Company (Russia) submitted their respective bids on March 29 in 2015.
Petrobangla and its bid evaluation committee members completed their bid evaluation before Mid-April’15 and submitted the report to Energy Division. But when the relevant file was placed to the Prime Minister’s Office, it cancelled the whole process without any reason and asked the Energy Division to go for a fresh tender.
Again the Energy Division took a fresh move and the state-owned Petrobangla selected an international firm for conducting multi-client seismic survey to assess hydrocarbon potentials in offshore gas blocks.
In this round of tender process, five international companies namely Norway-French joint venture TGS and Schlumberger, Chinese company BGP, Russian firm Dalmorneftegeophysica (DMNG) and Russian Marine Arctic Geological Expedition (MAGE), and UK-Based Spec Partners Ltd submitted the offers.
Of them, TGS and Schlumberger, the Norwegian-French joint venture, came out to be top qualified bidder in the evaluation process and the Energy Division received Prime Minister’s approval for awarding the contract to the company.
But when the proposal was placed for Economic Affairs Committee meeting, it again faced trouble as an influential member of the committee raised objection. Finally, the committee formed a 5-member review committee headed by Law Minister Anisul Haque.
Sources said the committee sat in a number of meetings and finanlised its proceedings. But in last six months, the committee did not submit its report to the Cabinet committee. As a result, the top priority project remained stuck up.
The idea of multi-client survey is that the selected firm will conduct survey in the country’s maritime boundary at its own cost. But after completion of the survey, it will share its findings with state-owned Petrobangla at a free of cost.
The selected firm will have a right to sell the findings and seismic data to aspirant international oil companies who want to participate in oil and gas exploration in the Bangladesh territory. Bangladesh has long been trying to award its offshore gas blocks to international oil companies since its settlement of maritime boundary disputes with neighboring India and Myanmar, but its effort were not very successful.
Many officials blamed the lack of seismic data of the gas blocks for failing to attract the international oil companies for the exploration of gas.
However, neighboring India and Myanmar have been successful to award their offshore blocks because of available data, said the Petrobangla officials.
