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9 foreign companies ready to take part in offshore bidding

Staff Correspondent
At least nine foreign oil and gas companies including some leading global names have expressed keen interest in the country's offshore block bidding for exploration.
Some of these companies are expected to submit tomorrow their offers for exploration in eight shallow water blocks and 20 deep-sea blocks in the Bay of Bengal.
Petrobangla said it sold promotional package and data of the offshore blocks worth S 1.26 million to 24 companies. Of them, nine purchased both promotional and data packages and the others purchased only the promotional package.
US company Chevron. Norwegian Statoilhydro Company. US Conono Phillips. Australian Santos International and Pearl Energy of Singapore purchased the highest volumes of data package.
Other oil companies that appeared to be serious arc PTT of Thailand. BP Exploration Operating Co of UK, Talisman Energy Canada and Total E&P
Bangladesh of France.
Since the bidding round was announced in February, 37 companies expressed interest in the bid and purchased the information package These companies include some Bangladeshi entities as well as Chinese. Malaysian, Indian, Japanese, South Korean and Myanmarese ones.
"We will be glad if five or six of them actually drop serious offers," said a Petrobangla high official.
The response received did not however make petrobangla officials very happy as many of them felt that it could have been better.
"It would have drawn more interest of the oil companies if promotional shows were staged in one or two countries," observed one official. The 1998-second round bidding initiatives included road shows in UK and USA, and received huge response. Besides, some other Asian countries are also currently holding exploration bids and thus engaged many oil companies there. The bidding this time is the first of its kind for Bangladesh where the focus is exclusively on the Bay of Bengal. India has been heavily exploring the Bay in recent years and has discovered 100 trillion cubic feet (tef) gas and two billion barrels of oil in place. Even Myanmar in 2006 discovered seven tef gas in an offshore area which may be overlapping with Bangladesh maritime boundary.
Petrobangla has been preparing for this block round from 2006. Each of these blocks has exploration area of between 3,000 square kilometres (sqkm) and 7,000 sqkm.
Offshore explorations need specialisation, and these are riskier and costlier than onshore explorations.
Some important features of the contracts under the bid include full repatriation of profit, no signature bonus or royalty, and no duty for equipment and machinery imported for operations during exploration, production and development phases.
Other features arc the contractor will give a carried stake of 10 percent to the government only for shallow offshore blocks, it will enjoy the provision for assignment, 100 percent cost recovery, maximum 55 percent cost recovery per calendar year, and a mandatory seismic programme and one well for each block exclusive of biddable work programme.
The contract will enjoy a discount on gas sale, discovery and production bonuses and annual contract service fee, and the contractor will be allowed local marketing of gas only if the government refuses to buy it first.