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India’s New Oilfield Regulations Attract Investors – BP CEO
India’s upstream oil and gas policy overhaul through a new legislation has made several improvements important for foreign investors that can help attract global players, global energy giant BP’s CEO said.
Parliament last month passed a bill that amended the Oil Fields (Regulation and Development) Act of 1948 by expanding its scope to include shale oil, shale gas and coal bed methane, in addition to oil and gas, while introducing sweeping measures aimed at improving the ease of doing business as well as providing fiscal and policy stability aimed to attract domestic and international investment.
The new legislation “made several improvements that are important for foreign investors like us,” BP CEO Murray Auchincloss told PTI in an interview.
The BP CEO was in India earlier this month, during which he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well as Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri.
“We believe the reforms can help mitigate risks and ensure operational clarity, creating an investor-friendly environment, supporting the modernisation of India’s oil and gas sector, and attracting global players,” he said.
He was deeply appreciative of the amendments made in the oilfield act to ease the way for increased foreign investment. He assured the Prime Minister that BP was working to support India’s energy needs in line with Modi’s vision of energy security for India with support from the ministry.
The new law gives policy stability and improved financial terms through a series of changes to the decades-old act. These include freedom to pursue international arbitration in the event of disputes, as well as offering a longer lease period.
India, which is 85 per cent dependent on imports for meeting its oil needs and buys nearly half of its gas needs from overseas, in recent years has undertaken a series of upstream reforms aimed at encouraging discovery of more oil and gas through increased exploration and bringing them to production quickly.
These include greater marketing freedom to producers and allowing companies to carve out areas for oil and gas exploration under the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP).
BP already partners Reliance Industries in the eastern offshore KG-D6 block that produces about 28 million standard cubic metres of natural gas per day.
Last year, BP and Reliance teamed up with state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) to bid for an oil and gas exploration block.
Both Modi and Puri encouraged BP to participate in the current bid round under OALP.
“I encouraged the energy supermajor to aggressively participate in the 10th Round of OALP, the largest bidding round of over 0.2 million sq kms and the first one after the passage of the landmark ORD Act, 2025,” Puri had said after meeting the BP CEO last week.
On the bid in OALP-IX round, Auchincloss said Reliance Industries and BP teamed up with ONGC for the OALP-IX bid round to “strengthen our bid for exploration rights in the Gujarat-Saurashtra basin.”
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