Kathmandu, May 19

The Ministry of Industry (MoI) today said that it would call a global tender within mid-June to explore petroleum products in various Tarai and Chure areas that have been identified as holding petroleum reserves.

Speaking at a programme in the Capital today, Minister for Industry Nabindra Raj Joshi informed that recent amendment in Petroleum Regulation, 1985, has encouraged and promoted exploration of petroleum products in viable areas in Nepal.

“We have been developing different modalities to explore petroleum products in viable areas. As we are close to completing the draft of the modality, we will call for a global tender by mid-June asking bidders to explore petroleum mines in the country,” he said.

According to Joshi, MoI will seek two different proposals from interested foreign companies — technical proposal and business proposal — for petroleum exploration work in Nepal and give more weightage to the technical proposal.

“As many international companies earlier had failed to work effectively to explore petroleum products in potential domestic areas, we have planned to award the petroleum exploration project to a company with sound technical proposal,” Minister Joshi said.

MoI has informed that it will assign 70 per cent weightage to the technical proposal of interested foreign companies and 30 per cent weightage to the financial proposal.

This is not the first time that the government has geared up to explore and extract petroleum products from different viable petroleum blocks in the country. In 1985, government had awarded a contract to Dutch firm Shell Company to explore petroleum products in Biratnagar.

Similarly, the government had authorised US-based Texana Resources Company in 1998 and Cairn Energy PLC of United Kingdom in 2004 to explore and extract petroleum products from different petroleum blocks.

However, the government had scrapped the petroleum exploration licences of all these companies in 2014 as they could not deliver tangible results in petroleum exploration.

The government survey has identified 10 petroleum blocks, one each in Dhangadi, Karnali, Nepalgunj, Lumbini, Chitwan, Birgunj, Malangawa, Janakpur, Rajbiraj and Biratnagar.