India has once again pushed back the deadline for bids in its flagship oil and gas licensing round, extending submissions under OALP-X to February 18. It is now the fourth delay since the round was unveiled with considerable fanfare at India Energy Week in February—and it underscores the widening gap between policy ambition and investor appetite.
OALP-X is anything but modest. It is the largest acreage offering ever made under India’s Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy, spanning nearly 192,000 square kilometers across 13 sedimentary basins. The portfolio is dominated by offshore blocks—ultra-deepwater, deepwater, and shallow water—alongside a smaller onshore component. In August, New Delhi shifted the original deadline to October to give bidders more time. That was followed by another extension to December. Now, the clock has been reset yet again.
This time, officials have offered no formal explanation. Unofficially, the reasons are familiar. Investor participation has been thin, constrained by regulatory complexity, high tax burdens, and persistent uncertainty around drilling rules and fiscal terms. A recent hike in the GST rate on exploration and production inputs has further dampened enthusiasm, as has the reality that the government take can climb to 60–70 percent of upstream revenues.
The delays come at an awkward moment. India imports more than 85 percent of the oil it consumes, a dependence it is keen to reduce. Crude import reliance hit a record in the last fiscal year, even as demand continued to rise and domestic output stagnated. The government is well aware of the imbalance, which is why it has been courting international majors and promoting frontier areas such as the Andaman offshore—sometimes invoking Guyana-style upside that has raised eyebrows.
On paper, interest exists. Petrobras has signed letters of intent with Indian state producers, while Exxon, Chevron, BP, and TotalEnergies have entered into cooperation agreements. But expressions of interest do not always translate into bids, and bids do not necessarily lead to drilling activity.
For now, repeated deadline extensions are keeping OALP-X on life support—but they also send a clear signal of hesitation that the market is unlikely to miss.
Note by Alessandro Bazzoni