New Delhi: Blaming the Director General of Hydrocarbon (DGH) for causing a crash in the company's shares, state owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) has accused oil regulator V K Sibal of discriminating against it by publicly rejecting a gas discovery contrary to upholding private sector claims in identical circumstances.
Alleging a "bias", ONGC acting chairman R S Sharma has written to Oil Ministry saying Sibal's media announcement had led to ONGC's share price crash from Rs 906 on February 19 to Rs 796 on March 1.
"The resultant loss in the market cap has been of the order of Rs 23,527 crore," he wrote.
The DGH had last month disallowed discovery of natural gas off the Andhra coast as ONGC had abandoned the well before doing conventional testing. ONGC stated that its assessment of over 14 trillion cubic feet of inplace gas reserves was based on MDT test conducted in presence of DGH representative.
When contacted, Sibal told PTI he wasn't aware of the complaint. "I am not aware of that. I have nothing more say."
Sharma sought an independent inquiry into Sibal's "malicious campaign" against ONGC.
"The blatant bias against ONGC in rejecting discovery of (well) UD-1 is obvious with reference to similar discoveries on MDT test having been allowed by DGH in favour of other non-PSU operators in adjoining acreages.
"We also have serious apprehensions that different norms are being applied for relinquishment of acreages for ONGC vis-a-vis certain other non-PSU operators. Even the quantum of penalties imposed on ONGC are highly excessive as against other operators for non completion of committed work programme," he wrote.
DGH had in the past allowed five discoveries of Reliance Industries in its prolific block D6 including Dhirubhai-2 find that was subsequently declared commercial, based on MDT tests.
Reliance on Monday announced two gas discoveries in east coast blocks based on the same MDT tests.
A petroleum ministry official acknowledged that logs of the well UD-1 in block KG-DWN-98/2, adjoining Reliance Industries' gas-rich KG-DWN-98/3 or D6, show gas presence.
"DGH is just a technical administrator for us. DGH is not a regulator as a regulatory body is always a multi-member board like in case of telecom regulator TRAI or capital market regulator SEBI. Also, the regulator process should allow for appeals which in DGH's case lie with us, so in that sense DGH is not a regulator," the official said.
While Sibal on Monday refused to comment on ONGC's claims, he had on March 2 told reporters that ONGC had in fact made a gas discovery and he wanted the state-run firm to conduct fresh tests to ascertain its commercial viability.
He had also acknowledged that ONGC had performed MDT test, which is globally done to check on discoveries, in presence of his representatives.
ONGC officials said that the conventional testing was not carried out, not because of well complications, as has been cited by Sibal, but because it was not necessary.
A Straddle-packer MDT test is globally recognised a cheaper, sophisticated and less-time consuming way of ascertaining a discovery.
The company said it stood by its assessment of 2.09 to 6.73 Tcf initial in-place volumes in northern structure and 2.61 to 8.03 Tcf in the southern structure identified through the UD-1 well. "The inplace volumes for both the culminations range from 2.09 Tcf to 14.76 Tcf."
Comments
0 comment