Oil India Eyes Canada E&P Partners, Deepwater Drilling And Critical Minerals Exploration

First of all, thank you very much for having me. It has been an excellent day one, and as usual, IEW remains a coveted event. This is the fourth edition, and we are getting immensely benefited. This has been my observation today. This year we had an excellent engagement. We spoke about the future exploration landscape as India as a destination with a couple of international majors. We also highlighted the current portfolio that Oil India is having. Currently we have about 1 lakh square kilometer of exploration acreage, out of which 60% belongs to deep and ultra deep water exploration acreage—55% to be precise—and also we are carrying out shallow water explorations in Andaman and Nicobar and in Kerala-Konkan. So discussions did happen around that, and then we also shared with the prospective partners the active seismic data acquisition that we have recently completed in the form of 2D seismic in our Mahanadi and KG basin deep water block, and 3D seismic is underway. We did discuss during the day some critical mineral opportunities as part of the National Critical Mineral Mission of Government of India. It identifies two buckets primarily: one is thrust in exploration domestic, and while the extractive methodology is something which we need to work on, overseas asset acquisition is also another facet. So Oil India, considering the fact that we have deep understanding on the exploration landscape, we saw there is a commonality of understanding as far as oil and gas is concerned and critical mineral is concerned. So we identified about six to eight of them, not 30 or 24. One of them is lithium. Then we have also picked up one block for potash in Rajasthan through the domestic bidding. We have got a block of graphite and vanadium through domestic bidding. So both these potash and graphite and vanadium are composite licenses for which exploration has kickstarted. We did discuss about it and also

Look, as far as composite license is concerned, it comes with a resource number, not a reserve number. So if I am able to give you a number, back-of-the-envelope calculation basis the data docket that is available, we are looking at about 5 million tons of graphite and 5 million tons of vanadium in terms of resource position. But exploration will give us more clarity that will help us in taking the FDI for mining. As far as potash is concerned, we are looking at about 25 plus million metric tons sitting at a depth of 500 meters in Rajasthan. And of course, we did discuss during the day about our biofuel initiatives at NRL. We did discuss about our overseas asset investments with prospective partners, and we also discussed about collaborations to help Oil India Limited to enhance its production. So any MOUs that you would like to talk about over the course of the next two or three days? We did have two or three of them with Reliance and shipbuilding; they have two joint ventures.

We are looking at tractions with our prospective partners. One MOU which I can cite is very crucial for us, very niche and very timely, is our MOU with IOC for compressed biogas plants which will be based on municipal solid waste to be located in our urban local bodies in the country, which will actually give a boost to the gas-based infrastructure and also meet the objective of the clarion call of honorable Prime Minister for Swachh Bharat Mission.

So we are—I'm not talking on behalf of Canada, I'm talking on behalf of Oil India. We did discuss about possible partnerships in the critical mineral space, specifically for rare earths. We will have more detailed discussions, then I'll be able to share much. We also talked about technology adoption in oil and gas sector, primarily for production enhancement. Canada is good at that, and Canada is also good in terms of resource potential because they are the fourth largest, having the fourth largest deposit of oil and gas, about 160 billion barrels of oil if I remember correctly.

Actually, we are looking at a different platform. Our prime focus is to do exploration in the country. So we have also reached out to the other Canadian counterparts in terms of possible collaboration to do exploration in India first.