The government has launched the process of mapping out hydrocarbon deposits in the country's sovereign maritime area before bidding for extracting the resources to ensure country's energy security, said officials.
The state-owned Petrobangla floated an international tender this week for carrying out two-dimensional non-exclusive multi-client seismic surveys in the offshore areas to determine and make an inventory of the resources, they said.
"The bid-winning contractors would get two years for data acquisition, processing and interpretation," Petrobangla director for production-sharing contract (PSC) Md Quamruzzaman told the FE Wednesday.
The total tenure of the agreement with the contractors would be 10 years.
A new bidding round to carry out oil-and-gas exploration in the Bay of Bengal would begin on conclusion of the surveys, with the findings in hand, said an official of the Petrobangla.
The Petrobangla authorities will have an edge in the bidding if it gets data beforehand.
Besides, it will also be able to sell data to be acquired following the seismic surveys, he said.
Petrobangla would not pay the awarded companies for the survey.
The bid-winning companies would share data and profit with Petrobangla after cost-recovery.
Mr Quamruzzaman said the survey would cover around 75,000-sq-km area in the Bay with the water depth ranging between 20 metres and above 2,500 metres.
The maritime areas of the country have been divided into 20 offshore blocks in the Bay of Bengal where the surveys would be carried out.
The areas where Bangladesh's lone exploration company Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration and Production Company Ltd (Bapex), Petrobangla's subsidiary, and international oil companies have already been carrying out explorations have been kept outside the purview of the seismic-survey programme.
"The objective of the survey is to provide the oil and gas industry with 2D Non-Exclusive Multi-Client seismic data of the offshore areas of Bangladesh in order to help with basin evaluation, prospect generation and robust bid participation," Mr Quamruzzaman said.
The bid-submission deadline is March 29, 2015
He said interested companies must have previous experience of conducting offshore multi-client seismic surveys in at least three different countries.
The contractors would have exclusive rights to licence the project data.
This is the first time Bangladesh has floated tender for conducting 2D seismic survey alone by foreign firms.
The country earlier had floated international tenders several times to carry out oil and gas exploration both in onshore and offshore areas by international oil companies (IOCs).
The bid-winning IOCs will have carried out 2D seismic surveys in their respective blocks before initiating oil and gas exploration.
The country's offshore areas are now well-demarcated following the verdicts from international courts.
The Hague-based United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), based in Hamburg, Germany, have resolved decades- old maritime-boundary disputes of Bangladesh with neighbouring India and Myanmar through their verdicts in June 2014 and March 2012 respectively.
The verdict of the tribunal gave the country a substantial share of the extended continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles sustaining Bangladesh's claim for equitable solution.
Bangladesh's last efforts during 2008 and 2012 did not get much response from oil companies due to the disputes.
During Bangladesh's 2008 bidding for oil-and-gas exploration, India and Myanmar had formally protested the move, saying that some of the blocks were located in their territories.
During the offshore bidding round in February 2008, Bangladesh had offered 28 offshore blocks -- 20 deepwater and eight in shallow water.
Bangladesh could award only parts of two deepwater blocks -- DS-08-10 and DS-08-11 -- to ConocoPhillips of the USA and that too after a series of meetings three years after the launch of the bidding round on June 16, 2011.
ConocoPhillips, however, pulled out from both these blocks by halting exploration activities on the claim that they found non-viable economic prospects there.
Although Bangladesh had selected UK's Tullow for shallow-water block SS-08-05 during the 2008 bidding, it could not ink a production-sharing contract (PSC) because of the dispute with India.
The country, however, awarded shallow-water block SS-11 to a joint venture of Australia's Santos and Singapore's KrisEnergy and SS-04 and SS-09 to the joint venture of ONGC Videsh and Oil India Ltd under the 2012 bidding round.
Also, only one bid each was obtained for three deep-water blocks - DS-12, DS-16 and DS-21 - from the joint venture of ConocoPhillips and Norway's Statoil during the 2012 bidding.
No PSCs for these blocks have yet been inked.
There is a bright prospect of getting hydrocarbon in Bangladesh's territorial waters as both India and Myanmar already have discovered substantial gas reserves in the Bay.
azizjst@yahoo.com
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