A government-formed evaluation committee has recommended the Energy and Mineral Resources Division to go ahead with the signing of a deal with a foreign joint venture to conduct a 2D seismic marine survey of Bangladesh’s offshore areas.
“We recommended the Energy and Mineral Resources Division to sign a deal with TGS-NOPEC and Schlumberger, a Norwegian-US joint venture, to conduct a 2D seismic survey,” a member of the committee said, seeking anonymity.
Earlier, the state-owned Bangladesh Oil, Gas and Mineral Corporation, commonly known as Petrobangla, invited tenders from international geophysical companies on behalf of the government to conduct the survey on a non-exclusive multi-client basis.
Responding to the invite, five international geophysical companies submitted tender documents in this regard on March 29 this year.
The government formed a tender evaluation committee headed by a Petrobangla director to evaluate the documents, who evaluated and selected a company to enter a 10-year deal, a Petrobangla official said.
Petrobangla will share the profits from the sale of the data, he added.
The survey coverage area is around 118,000sq-km with water depth ranging from 20 metres to more than 2,500 metres.
After a three-year pause, the government is planning to formulate a fresh production sharing contract (PSC) model to award offshore hydrocarbon blocks in the Bay of Bengal.
The survey, the first of its kind in the country’s history, was deemed necessary after Bangladesh’s maritime boundaries with Myanmar and India were settled recently.
The maritime border settlement awarded Bangladesh a territorial sea covering 118,000sq-km and an exclusive economic zone extending to 200 nautical miles.
The objective of the survey is to provide the oil and gas industry with 2D seismic data of the offshore areas of Bangladesh to aid basin evaluation, prospect generation and robust bid-round participation.
