A trade and investment friendly atmosphere is prevailing in Bangladesh. Awarding process would be finalized by October and hopefully exploration process will start by the next winter.

Special assistant to chief adviser for the ministry of power, energy and mineral resources professor M Tamim told While addressing the inaugural session of the Road Show for the Off shore bidding.

Professor M Tamim said, “A trade and investment friendly atmosphere is prevailing in Bangladesh, particularly under the present caretaker Government and i believe this friendly atmosphere will prevail in the future days also”.

Special assistant told, “As per gas sector master plan and strategy Bangladesh would need about 24 trillion cubic feet of additional gas to meet the country’s projected demand up to the year 2025. If the projected exploration ventures do not yield significant results of existing gas fields failed to prove currently estimated resulted the deficit will kick in much earlier. About $8 billion need to be invested to find and develop the require reserves. Over the last decade gas consumption has been increasing at an average rate of 8 % per annum. Major consumers of gas are the power plants and the fertilizer factories”.

“We have discovered five coal deposits with proven reserve of about 2350 million tons and the proven plus probable of about 3450 million tons. Soon we are expecting a coal policy, which will address the concerns surrounding extraction of coal” he told.

“Bangladesh imports about 1.2 million metric tons of crude oil along with 2.6 million metric tons of refined petroleum products per annum” he added.

Mohammad Mohsin secretary for the energy division and chairman Jalal Ahmed were also delivered their speech on this occasion.

Over 80 company from native and abroad have registered for the Road show. 25 Information package and 17 promotional packages have been sold.

Bangladesh Offshore has been recently divided in to 30 blocks of different sizes ranging from 2611 sq kilometers to 7703 sq km for petroleum exploration. Of these 30 blocks, 2 blocks are already under PSC since 1997. While the rest 28 blocks have been opened for interested international company for petroleum exploration, development and production under production and sharing contract.