Country flagship oil exploration giant, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) in a recent move has decided to invest Rs. 50,000 crore ($10 billion) in the next couple of years creating necessary infrastructure to add new oil and gas fields into production and the company has projected a 15 per cent rise in crude production to 29 million tons by 2012-13.

The government controlled explorer has decided to invest heavily in augmenting recovery from its oilfields and developing new ones. The company has managed to arrest natural decline to a great extent through special technical campaigns as more than Rs. 30,000 crore has already been invested in these programmes in the recent past, Chairman, R S Sharma said, adding that the ONGC has made 117 new oil and gas discoveries since 2003, and majority of them are in blocks assigned to the company on nomination basis.

The ONGC Director, Sudhir Vasudeva clarified that first major set of discoveries which is put into production would be off the east coast in which the company will invest about $1 billion alone in the fields made in eastern offshore and will begin production by mid 2010. As far as its overseas operations are concerned its Imperial Energy, the latest acquisition of the parent overseas investment arm of the ONGC Videsh too, has nearly doubled its production to 11,500 barrel per day (bpd). The ONGC had in last year bought the Imperial with acreages in Siberia for over 2 billion. The ONGC Videsh is targeting 16,000 bpd by the year end and 25,000 bpd by the end of 2010. The company expects output at its deep sea projects in Brazil to rise to 40,000 bpd by the end of the year offsetting the natural decline that have affected its projects in Sudan and Russia.