At India Energy Week 2026, Ranjit Rath, Chairman and Managing Director, Oil India Limited

First of all, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure being a participant in this fourth edition of IEW. As far as responsible hydrocarbon is concerned, I must tell you something very basic. Anything and everything that we do goes through a process of environmental clearances, and if there are forests or wildlife sanctuaries, all those clearances are taken. That's one. Second, we give safety as our priority. So all the operations that we do, we not only create a safe environment of operation but also we create a kind of sustainable approach as part of our field areas. Unlike the typical manufacturing setup which is boundary-driven, the kind of exploration activity that we do, these are all individual well planes 130 by 130 meters or so, and maximum there will be a tank farm where the oil is collected. Now with that kind of spread, what we necessarily do is we ensure safe operations and we ensure sustainable operation, and we also handle all the wastes very very sensibly complying to the environmental clearances that is given. Having said so, let me share with you and with your viewers: 2024-25, Oil India has scripted the highest ever safety record since inception and it corresponded to the highest ever production of 6.71 million metric tons of oil and oil equivalent. So if you do safe and sustainable operation, it gets translated in highest ever production.

Absolutely right. Oil India has been doing exploration since last 100 years plus, because being the oldest E&P company, you would recall 1889 was the first discovery. Give you a context. Then we were drilling about 50 meters. Today we are drilling about 5,500 to 6,000 meters. And all those drillings are possible when and only after you establish prospectivity of the area, and that prospectivity happens through seismic data acquisition, processing and interpretation. So as we go deeper and deeper horizons from 50 to 5,000 meters, the technology has evolved from single line single channel to multi-channel to 2D seismic to 3D seismic, then full wave inversion, pre-stack, post-stack depth migration. So all these calls for heavy-duty data processing, and to cater to that, Oil India has already created a high performance computing center, and over the years we have gathered this knowledge and insight, and that is helping us to add more crude oil production through enhanced drilling and by drilling deeper.

It is not a hype. What is essentially required is how do you target, how do you do the assessment of the target horizon that you are looking at. The best part of this learning is how do you see commonality of basins and a similar success story elsewhere globally. If I draw a parallel, the west coast of Africa and the east coast of Latin America were called conjugal boundaries. And you would see that the discoveries which have happened on either side have actually juxtaposed and has helped to new discoveries across in a similar manner. We also foresee that a lot of basin commonality needs to be in place. Whether we are looking at Andaman Nicobar to draw a parallel, north of Andaman Nicobar we have got huge gas fields bordering Myanmar, and south of Andaman Nicobar we have Sumatra basin where we know oil and gas is proliferate. So we also strongly believe that Andaman Nicobar is a destination for exploration. So similar kind of approach we need to do for our Mahanadi basin and Kutch basin. Right. So it's not a hype. The data that you acquire with the new technologies that are in place with the more deeper horizon imaging gives us more confidence to undertake that one well or the tenth well, because the success ratio of discovery is often 10 to 1 or 12 to 1. The better the data, the better it is.