Leading five or six international oil companies have not shown interest in exploring gas and oil in Bangladesh, said high foreign ministry official.
They were interested about what Bangladesh didn't offer, he added.
“They are interested about a kind of terms and conditions which we don’t offer,” said Md Khurshed Alam, Secretary to the Maritime Affairs Unit of the ministry, at a roundtable dialogue on Blue Economy in Bangladesh yesterday.
The programme was organised by Board of Investment where Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali, Energy Adviser to the Prime Minister Toufiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury and other senior government officials and representatives from the private sector attended.
The top companies are going to Myanmar as their terms and conditions are more acceptable to the IOCs, Md Khurshed Alam said.
The secretary said in last June he traveled to Jamaica where he had a discussion with a Canadian company, Nautilus Mineral, which was doing business in Tonga, a tiny island.
“I asked them why they are not interested about Bangladesh. They mentioned political instability as a reason,” he said.
According to the energy adviser, Bangladesh cannot offer the terms and conditions what Myanmar offers to the oil companies.
“Myanmar’s intention is to monetise the resources while Bangladesh wants to inject the resources to the economy. We have different objectives,” he said.
He said Bangladesh would redesign its block for bidding and already revised production sharing contract (PSC) for that. “We hope that it would be attractive enough for the IOCs.”
Bangladesh signed PSC with six IOCs – three from the US, one from Canada and one from former Yugoslavia – for offshore exploration in 1974 but they left as India and Myanmar both objected to as maritime delimitation was not settled that time.