Fight For Foreign Assets: Oil Firms Focus On Production

Faced with elevated demand, idle output at home and a need to diversify from Iranian crude imports lost to Western sanctions, Indian oil companies are hungry for deals like ONGC’s Kashagan buy that promise supplies sooner rather than later.

Highlights from market news:

– State-run ONGC Videsh has agreed to pay about $5 billion for 8.4 percent of the Kashagan field in Kazakhstan, the world’s largest oilfield discovery in four decades

– Asia’s third-largest economy plans to hit 8 percent growth in 2014/15 and by 2030 that could lift it to be third-largest in the world and also the No. 3 energy consumer, according to BP.

– ONGC Videsh said in its 2011/12 annual report that its tough production targets – 20 million tonnes of oil equivalent by 2017/18 and 60 million tonnes by 2029/30 – mean it “needs to concentrate on acquiring assets in (the) development and production phase initially” before looking at exploration acreage.