ONGC Plans ₹1-Lakh-Crore Deepwater Exploration Drive with 87 Wells by 2031

India’s state-owned energy major Oil and Natural Gas Corporation is preparing to invest around ₹1 lakh crore over the next five years in deepwater and ultra-deepwater exploration, marking one of the company’s largest concentrated exploration campaigns as India attempts to unlock hydrocarbon resources beneath its offshore basins.

ONGC Chairman and CEO Arun Kumar Singh said the company plans to drill 87 deepwater and ultra-deepwater wells by March 2031. The programme represents an aggressive expansion of offshore exploration at a time when India is seeking to reverse stagnation in domestic oil and gas production and reduce its vulnerability to imported energy.

The drilling programme will accelerate progressively. ONGC plans to drill eight deepwater and ultra-deepwater wells during FY2026-27, followed by 10 wells in FY2027-28, 20 in FY2028-29, 22 in FY2029-30 and 27 in FY2030-31. Together, these add up to the planned 87-well campaign.

Deepwater exploration is significantly more technically demanding and expensive than conventional onshore or shallow-water drilling. Wells must often be drilled through kilometres of seawater and rock under extreme pressures and temperatures, requiring specialised drilling vessels, subsea equipment, sophisticated seismic imaging and advanced well-control technology. The potential rewards, however, can be substantial if large hydrocarbon systems are discovered.

India’s Offshore Exploration Push Accelerates

ONGC’s programme closely complements the government’s recently approved Samudra Manthan — National Offshore Exploration Scheme, which has an outlay of ₹84,084 crore up to FY2030-31. The scheme is intended to accelerate exploration in India’s deepwater, ultra-deepwater and frontier offshore basins while reducing some of the enormous financial risk involved in drilling exploratory wells.

Under Samudra Manthan, the government has allocated ₹43,200 crore specifically for drilling 60 deepwater exploration wells. Eligible projects can receive government support covering as much as 50% of qualifying drilling costs, subject to a ceiling of ₹675 crore per well. The programme also provides funding for seismic surveys, common offshore infrastructure and domestic oil-and-gas manufacturing and service zones.

The government expects the wider initiative to help add more than 600 million tonnes of oil and oil-equivalent gas to India’s hydrocarbon reserves if exploration produces the anticipated results.

ONGC has already begun moving deeper into frontier offshore regions. Under its internal Project DeepX, the company has assembled a specialised task force to accelerate deepwater exploration. During FY2025-26, it drilled four exploratory wells in the ultra-deep waters of the Andaman Basin. It has also started drilling in the Mahanadi Basin, expanding exploration into another relatively underexplored offshore frontier.

These efforts follow previous deepwater discoveries and exploration work along India’s eastern continental margin, including the Krishna-Godavari Basin. ONGC has also pursued technological collaboration with major international energy companies as it attempts to gain access to expertise needed for difficult deepwater reservoirs.

Reducing India’s Dependence on Imported Energy

The scale of the programme reflects India’s underlying energy challenge. India is one of the world’s largest consumers of crude oil, but domestic production satisfies only a relatively small portion of demand. The country currently imports more than 88% of its crude-oil requirements, while roughly half of its natural-gas consumption is also met through imports.

That exposure makes the economy particularly sensitive to international crude prices, geopolitical conflict, shipping disruptions and instability along important energy corridors. Finding commercially viable domestic offshore reserves would therefore have consequences extending well beyond ONGC’s own production figures.

India’s mature producing fields also experience natural decline as reservoir pressure falls over time. Continuous exploration is consequently required merely to replace declining production before additional growth can be achieved. Deepwater and ultra-deepwater basins represent some of the largest remaining areas where significant new domestic discoveries could potentially be made.

ONGC Also Plans Global Oil Trading Platform

Alongside its offshore exploration push, ONGC is preparing to establish an international oil and gas trading joint venture, potentially based in Dubai or Singapore. Singh said around 95% of the preparatory work has been completed and the company is in advanced discussions over the international partner and location.

The proposed trading operation is expected to handle as much as 50 million tonnes of crude oil, petroleum products and gas annually, including third-party volumes. It would enable the wider ONGC group to consolidate trading expertise and potentially coordinate some of the crude and product flows associated with subsidiaries including Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals and ONGC Videsh.

The venture would represent a significant shift for ONGC. The company has traditionally concentrated on exploration and production, while refining and marketing activities have largely been conducted by subsidiaries. A dedicated international trading operation would give the group a stronger presence in global energy markets and could improve procurement, optimisation and risk management across its businesses.

ONGC is considering Dubai and Singapore because both are major international commodity-trading centres, with established ecosystems of banks, shipping companies, energy traders, insurers and commodity-market professionals. The company expects the platform to begin operations after the remaining regulatory, contractual and partnership arrangements are completed.

Exploration Remains at the Core

Despite the move into trading and other segments of the energy business, ONGC has emphasised that oil and gas exploration and production will remain its central activity. The proposed ₹1-lakh-crore deepwater programme illustrates the scale of that commitment.

The combination of ONGC’s 87-well campaign and the government’s Samudra Manthan programme could substantially increase the amount of geological information available for India’s offshore basins even before commercial discoveries are considered. Every deepwater well provides new information about rock formations, reservoir characteristics, pressure systems and hydrocarbon potential in areas that remain relatively unexplored.

Offshore exploration carries no guarantee that every well will produce a commercial discovery. It is capital-intensive, technologically complex and can take several years from initial exploration to first production. The strategic importance of ONGC’s programme therefore lies not simply in the number of wells being drilled, but in the decision to systematically explore India’s deepwater frontier at a scale rarely attempted before.

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