The Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources (MPEMR) has deferred a plan to announce fresh offshore bidding round programme due to coronavirus pandemic.
The Energy and Mineral Resources Division under the ministry had a plan to announce the programme on Tuesday, coinciding with the birth centenary of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and launch the bidding round from September 15.
The MPEMR has postponed the plan, considering the global coronavirus pandemic, said a senior official.
The programme will be announced later once the coronavirus fear is over. Under the plan, the state-run Petrobangla will launch a fresh bidding round, offering offshore blocks adjacent to gas-rich blocks of Myanmar, he added.
Earlier, the announcement to float the bidding round was planned to come on March 17, 2020. The deadline of receiving bids from international oil companies (IOCs) was planned for March 10, 2021.
Signing of production sharing contracts (PSCs) with the bid-winning IOCs was planned by May 26, 2021.
Petrobangla, however, separately planned to launch multi-client seismic survey in offshore blocks by Norwegian-US joint venture TGS-Schlumberger in September, as final deal with the contractor has already been inked.
Petrobangla floated the latest bidding round six years back in 2012, through which shallow-water blocks and one deep-water block were awarded to contractors.
But not a single exploratory well was drilled by the contractors concerned by this time. Petrobangla rather extended tenure of the PSCs by two years each for the contractors.
To allure IOCs for the upcoming bidding round, Petrobangla has revised upward the price of natural gas in the latest model PSC.
As per the model PSC 2019, gas price for the deep sea blocks has been set at around US$ 7.26 per mmBtu (metric million British thermal unit), up by 11.69 per cent from the previous PSC.
The price of natural gas, set forth in the model PSC, is almost same to the current level of liquefied natural gas (LNG) import price.
Petrobangla is currently importing lean LNG at an average price of around $8.0 per mmBtu from Qatargas and Oman Trading International, a senior Petrobangla official told the FE.
With re-gasification fee of around $0.60 per mmBtu, the price of re-gasified LNG stands at around $8.60 per mmBtu. Taking into account transmission cost of around $1.0 per mmBtu, gas price from the deep sea blocks stands at around $8.26 per mmBtu, said the official.
