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Around a dozen of international oil companies (IOCs) will be in talks with top Petrobangla officials over the next two weeks to weigh up benefits as offered in the newly minted production sharing contracts before the next bidding round for hydrocarbon exploration.
The IOCs that have already confirmed their participation in the talks include ExxonMobil of the US, BP of the UK, POSCO of South Korea and PTTEP of Thailand, a senior Petrobangla official told the FE on Wednesday.
The state-owned Petrobangla has initiated one-to-one talks with the IOCs to appraise them about hydrocarbon pricing, contract terms and updates about seismic survey, he said.
The meetings will be held at the Petrocentre in Dhaka. "We will hold talks with the interested IOCs from September 15 until the end of this month," the official added.
Ideally one meeting will be held each day with an IOC, but a maximum of a couple of meetings might also take place in a day as per the plan, he said.
Petrobangla expects that sharing of the terms of model PSC with the IOCs would encourage them to take part in the upcoming bidding round.
In the past several rounds of biddings, Petrobangla did not get satisfactory responses from the IOCs.
About the next round of bidding, officials said the IOCs would not be required to carry out 2D seismic survey this time. TGS-Schlumberger, a Norwegian-US joint venture (JV), will conduct the survey.
On completion of the survey, the IOCs will be able to purchase non-exclusive multi-client seismic data of the offshore blocks from the JV to carry out basin evaluation and prospect generation.
The JV, however, will have to share the seismic data and the profits with Petrobangla free of cost.
The TGS-Schlumberger would get two years to complete the survey and over the next eight years it would be free to trade the data.
Officials said Bangladesh never carried out multi-client seismic survey in offshore areas.
The country had earlier floated international tenders several times, inviting IOCs to carry out oil and gas exploration both in onshore and offshore locations.
The bid-winning IOCs would carry out seismic surveys on their own in their respective blocks before the firms initiated oil and gas exploration.
The country's offshore areas are now well-demarcated following the verdicts of international courts.
Bangladesh has territorial rights to up to 200 nautical miles from the shore as exclusive economic zone in the Bay of Bengal.
Besides, the country has free access to around 387 nautical miles into deep sea following the demarcation of maritime boundary by the international court of arbitration.
Petrobangla had held offshore bidding rounds in 2008 and 2012. It, however, has not offered any onshore oil and gas blocks since 1997.
Bangladesh currently has a total of 31 open blocks to offer in the next bidding round, of which nine are located in onshore areas, 14 located in deep sea, and eight in the shallow sea.
Currently, only four onshore gas-fields are in production under the operations by two IOCs -- the US-based Chevron and Singapore's Kris Energy.
Five IOCs, however, have active PSCs, either individually or under joint venture, to explore three shallow water blocks and one deep water block.
ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) and Oil India Ltd (OIL) are jointly exploring shallow water blocks -- SS-04 and SS-09.
The joint venture of Australian Santos and Kris Energy is exploring shallow water block SS-11.
POSCO Daewoo Corporation has exploration contract to discover hydrocarbon in deep water block DS-12.
The country's overall natural gas production from local fields of around 2,700 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd) comes only from onshore fields.
The overall natural gas output is around 3,200 mmcfd, including supplies of re-gasified LNG (liquefied natural gas).