ONGC Videsh completes stake buy in Namibian oil block

New Delhi: ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL), the overseas arm of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), on Wednesday said it has completed acquisition of 30 percent interest in an oil block off Namibia from UK's Tullow Oil.

Without disclosing the value of the deal, OVL in a statement said it has completed acquisition of 30 percent interest in the Namibian Petroleum Exploration License (PEL) 37, covering three blocks of 2112A, 2012B and 2113B.

Tullow Oil held 65 percent interest in the oil block. Pancontinental Namibia (Pty) Ltd holds 30 percent interest and the remaining 5 percent is with Paragon Oil and Gas.

Tullow, with remaining 35 percent participating interest, shall continue to remain the operator of the licence.

"The completion of the present transaction marks OVL's entry in Namibian offshore and is consistent with its strategic objective of adding high impact exploration and production assets to its existing exploration and production portfolio," the statement said.

PEL 37 covers three adjacent blocks over 17,000 sq km in the central Walvis Basin offshore Namibia.

To date, four large prospects and three large leads have been mapped in detail. They have potential for combined prospective resources of more than 900 million barrels of oil (recoverable).

OVL is India's largest international oil and gas exploration and production company. It has 38 projects in 17 countries including Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Myanmar, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, Venezuela, Vietnam and New Zealand.

It currently produces about 285,000 barrels of oil and oil equivalent gas per day and has total oil and gas reserves (2P) of about 704 million tonnes of oil equivalent as on April 1, 2017.