Oil India sees the Andaman-Nicobar basin as a major destination for future oil and gas exploration, backed by strong basin commonality with prolific hydrocarbon regions in Southeast Asia, the company’s Chairman and Managing Director Ranjit Rath said at India Energy Week 2026.
Drawing parallels with global exploration success stories, he said Oil India believes that geological similarities between neighbouring basins significantly improve discovery prospects. “North of Andaman-Nicobar we have huge gas fields bordering Myanmar, and south of Andaman-Nicobar we have the Sumatra basin, which we know is prolific in oil and gas,” he said, adding that such basin commonality has historically helped unlock new discoveries worldwide.
Rath said this approach mirrors global examples such as the west coast of Africa and the east coast of Latin America, where matching geological boundaries on either side led to significant discoveries. A similar strategy, he noted, is being applied to Indian basins including Andaman-Nicobar, the Mahanadi basin and the Krishna-Godavari basin.
He emphasised that the company’s confidence in frontier exploration is rooted in advances in seismic data acquisition and processing. Oil India has evolved from shallow drilling of around 50 metres to drilling depths of 5,500–6,000 metres, supported by increasingly sophisticated subsurface imaging technologies. These include 2D and 3D seismic surveys, full-wave inversion and advanced depth migration techniques, all of which require heavy data processing.
To support this, Oil India has set up a high-performance computing centre, enabling detailed seismic interpretation and better targeting of deeper horizons.
“The better the data imaging, the better the confidence to undertake that one well or the tenth well,” he said, noting that exploration success ratios typically remain low and data quality plays a critical role.
The Oil India chief also underlined that exploration decisions are taken with a broad hydrocarbon perspective, without pre-judging outcomes as oil- or gas-specific until discoveries are established.
On the policy front, he said recent reforms have improved the ease of doing business in upstream exploration, particularly in deepwater and ultra-deepwater areas. These include the HELP regime, open acreage licensing, revenue-sharing models for Category II and III basins, and amendments to the Oilfields Regulation and Development Act, alongside updated petroleum and natural gas rules.
He said unlocking large offshore and Andaman-Nicobar areas has expanded exploration opportunities, while policy stability is essential to attract investment into high-risk frontier exploration.
