Dhaka: Petrobangla is close to completing its evaluation of the bids received in the re-tender of the 2D Non-Exclusive Multi-Client Seismic Survey in the offshore area of Bangladesh.

According to official sources, the state-owned hydrocarbons corporation received bids from five international seismic survey companies on January 31, the last day for bid submission under the re-tender.

State Minister for Power and Energy Nasrul Hamid said the multi-client survey will remove the government’s limitations regarding seismic data in maritime areas.

‘Once the data is available, it would strengthen our capacity to negotiate better deals for the country with the international oil companies,’ he told UNB.

The five bidders are Norway-based Tomlinson Geophysical Services Inc & Schlumberger, China’s BGP, DMNG and Marine Arctic Geological Expedition (MAGE) from Russia, and US-based Geotrace.  Officials said that of these five companies, all except MAGE participated in the first tender invited by Petrobangla in February 2015. A Singapore based company-Dolphin Geophysical- that took part in the first tender did not submit any bid this time.

‘Soon after receiving the tender proposals, we started evaluation and now we’re at the final stage. We hope to be able to wrap up our evaluation and submit it to the Energy Ministry for approval within this month,’ said a senior official at Petrobangla, who is involved in the evaluation process.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said there is an instruction from the government’s ‘upper level’ to complete the job as early as possible, as they do not want to wait long to award the contract to carry out the multi-client survey.

Petrobangla reportedly floated the re-tender following disapproval from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of the first tender.

Petrobangla officials said that this time a total of 21 offshore blocks have been placed for the multi-client survey while last time the number of blocks were 20.

They informed that in the re-tender, three new deep sea blocks (DS-12, DS-16 and DS-21) were included for survey while two deep sea blocks (DS-10 and DS-11) were excluded from the list.

They said that though the government had been negotiating with a foreign company- Statoil of Norway -to sign a production sharing contract for the three newly-included blocks, they were added to the list as there was no sign of a successful conclusion to these talks.

All the original terms and conditions of the tender remain unchanged in the re-tender. Whoever wins the contract will have to complete the data acquisition, processing and interpretation within 24 months of the signing of the contract. The company will ink a 10-year agreement with Petrobangla to sell this data to third parties.

Petrobangla will not share any of the costs incurred by the job, but will retain the right to share the survey results and relevant data with prospective investors, usually the international oil and gas companies.

Officials said the government decided to go for a multi-client survey company in order to acquire data on the prospective hydrocarbon deposits in the country’s newly undisputed maritime territories, following a decision of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Non-availability of this data was proving a stumbling block to a number of attempts by the government to award contracts to the IOCs for the country’s deep sea blocks.