What ORDA 2025 actually changed

The Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Amendment Act, 2025 received the President's assent on 28 March 2025 and came into force on 15 April 2025, amending the parent Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Act, 1948. Most of the amendment is about the petroleum business itself — it replaces the old "mining lease" terminology with a single "petroleum lease" covering exploration, development and production together, extends lease tenure to up to 30 years (extendable for a field's full economic life), and adds a new Section 13A grandfathering leases granted before the amendment under their original terms.

The renewable-energy hook that this piece is actually about sits somewhere less dramatic: the amendment expanded the list of things the Central Government may make rules about under the Act to explicitly include "comprehensive energy projects" at oilfields — the planning, development, installation, sharing and use of infrastructure for both petroleum operations and solar, wind and other renewable energy projects on the same licensed land, alongside decarbonisation, carbon capture and storage (CCUS), hydrogen and coal gasification. It is not a standalone "you may now build solar here" clause; it is a rule-making power, and the Centre exercised it through a companion notification, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Rules, 2025. That rulebook's Chapter VII — "Environment Protection, Decarbonisation, Monitoring of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Flared Gas" — is where the actual obligations and permissions sit: GHG monitoring and reporting requirements, a CCS/CCUS framework, and site-restoration funds with five years of mandatory post-closure monitoring, alongside the provision letting a lease-holder co-locate renewable generation on the same acreage. For CO₂ storage specifically, the mechanics of where that gas would actually go are territory this blog has already mapped, well basin by well basin.

What can be verified about ONGC's land is more modest but still real: under the nomination regime, DGH and the petroleum ministry's own block-award data put ONGC's licensed acreage at roughly 94,358 sq km (9 petroleum exploration licences and 334 petroleum mining leases); ONGC's own FY23 disclosures separately describe it as holding India's largest exploratory acreage, at 162,701 sq km as of 31 March 2023, a figure that includes NELP- and OALP-awarded blocks alongside nomination acreage. Both numbers describe genuinely large, already-licensed, already-grid-connected land — the kind ORDA 2025's rule-making power was written for. Neither number, on its own, tells you how much of it is actually suitable for solar or wind at scale; that would need a site-by-site resource and land-use survey this piece did not find published anywhere.

The number ONGC's own land has produced so far

ONGC's dedicated renewable-energy arm, ONGC Green Limited, was approved for formation by the petroleum ministry on 5 December 2023 and incorporated on 27 February 2024 — after ORDA 2025's predecessor bill was already moving through Parliament, and well before the amendment itself took effect. Its mandate is exactly what the new rule-making power was meant to enable: renewable generation, green hydrogen and decarbonisation projects, including on ONGC's own oilfield acreage.

Measured against that mandate, the organic build on ONGC's own land is, so far, negligible. ONGC's rooftop solar — the renewable capacity that is actually sitting on land the company already holds and controls — consists of 11 grid-connected installations totalling 647 kilowatts and 6 off-grid installations totalling 49 kilowatts, a combined 696 kW. That is a rounding error against any of the gigawatt-scale numbers this piece discusses next, and it is not obviously accelerating: no utility-scale ground-mounted solar or wind project sited on ONGC's own petroleum-lease acreage under the new legal framework was found publicly announced as of this piece's research. ORDA 2025 removed the legal obstacle to building on the land ONGC already has; sixteen months on, that removal has not yet translated into ONGC's own construction crews breaking ground on it.

How ONGC actually got to gigawatt scale: it didn't build, it bought

The renewable capacity ONGC can actually point to came from an acquisition, not a Development Plan filed under the new rules. In February 2025, ONGC NTPC Green Private Limited (ONGPL) — a 50:50 joint venture between ONGC Green and NTPC Green Energy Limited — signed a share purchase agreement for Ayana Renewable Power at a headline enterprise value of ₹19,500 crore. That figure, widely reported at signing and on CCI clearance, is the deal's enterprise value — equity plus the debt ONGPL assumed as part of the transaction — not the cash paid for the shares themselves. The actual equity consideration, paid on completion on 27 March 2025, was ₹6,248.5 crore (₹23.22 per share); the roughly ₹13,250 crore gap between the two figures is Ayana's assumed debt. ONGC funded its half of the equity purchase through a ₹3,300 crore rights issue into ONGC Green, with NTPC Green matching ₹3,124.25 crore for its half.

Ayana itself brought a portfolio of roughly 4.1 GW of operational and under-construction/development solar and wind assets — built by Ayana over the preceding several years, largely on land Ayana itself had assembled, not ONGC's petroleum leases. With Ayana folded in, ONGC and ONGC Green's combined renewable portfolio stood at 2.85 GW as of November 2025, with further tenders in progress (300 MW of wind, 600 MW of solar, 1,200 MWh of battery storage) that would take the total to roughly 3.70 GW, against a stated company target of 10 GW by 2030. Every gigawatt of that build to date sits on land Ayana already controlled before ONGC bought it — not on the petroleum-lease acreage ORDA 2025 specifically unlocked.

Why land alone was never going to be the whole story

None of this means ORDA 2025 was pointless, or that oilfield land won't eventually matter. India's own demand math is why the option exists at all: the Central Electricity Authority's Long-Term National Resource Adequacy Plan (LT-NRAP), published in March 2026, projects electricity demand climbing from roughly 1,846 billion units in FY2025-26 to 3,365 billion units by FY2035-36 — a trajectory that, in the CEA's own optimal generation mix for that year, needs 509 GW of solar and 155 GW of wind installed, against just 150.26 GW of solar and 56.09 GW of wind actually installed as of March 2026 (part of 283.46 GW of total non-fossil capacity, per the renewable energy ministry's own physical-progress data). Closing that gap needs land, and land that is already licensed, already has grid connections and existing environmental clearances, and doesn't require a fresh site-acquisition fight is exactly the kind of asset a law like ORDA 2025 is written to unlock, whatever ONGC has or hasn't done with it yet.

What ONGC's own numbers suggest is that having the legal right to build isn't the binding constraint. Three more concrete ones are:

• Transmission. The Green Energy Corridor programme's next phase, GEC Phase 3, was proposed in the FY26 Budget at an estimated cost of roughly ₹56,000 crore (the Centre covering about 40%, the rest from state governments and other stakeholders), meant to build the HVDC transmission backbone — concentrated in Gujarat and Rajasthan — that GEC Phases 3 and 4 together are meant to let roughly 150 GW of renewable power actually reach the grid. It isn't due to commission until around 2029-30. Without it, any large new solar or wind build in Gujarat specifically — ONGC's oilfield land included — risks being curtailed for lack of somewhere to send the power, the same evacuation bottleneck this blog has already documented for India's wind fleet more broadly.
• Institutional mismatch. ONGC was constituted to find and produce petroleum; its roughly 32,000-strong workforce is trained for that, not for developing and operating renewable generation. ONGC Green exists precisely to bridge that gap, but a subsidiary formed in February 2024 competing for the parent company's capital allocation against oilfield exploration and enhanced-oil-recovery projects is a genuinely different institutional problem than simply having a legal green light.
• Offtake risk in deficit states. Any large-scale RE project ultimately needs a buyer willing and able to pay for the power over 20-25 years, and India's most power-deficient states — the ones with the most room for new demand — also tend to run the DISCOMs with the weakest balance sheets and the histories of payment delay this blog's own DISCOM debt-relief piece has covered. A long-term power-purchase agreement without a central or state payment backstop is a real, not theoretical, risk to any large new RE asset, ONGC's or anyone else's.

What would fix this

• DGH and the petroleum ministry should require ONGC to file at least one Development Plan for renewable generation on its own oilfield acreage, with a public site and timeline. ORDA 2025 created the legal pathway; nothing currently forces ONGC to actually use it rather than substitute an acquisition for it.
• ONGC Green's annual disclosures should separately report organically developed capacity against acquired capacity. A single "2.85 GW, heading to 10 GW" headline currently lets an M&A deal and a from-scratch oilfield-solar project read identically, when they represent completely different progress against the law's actual purpose.
• The Ministry of Power should prioritise GEC Phase 3's Gujarat and Rajasthan legs specifically, since that is where both ONGC's largest acreage and its Ayana-derived generation cluster already sit; a 2029-30 commissioning date leaves a multi-year window in which any oilfield-sited solar would have nowhere to send surplus power.
• Any future oilfield-sited RE project selling into a deficit state should carry a tripartite Centre-state payment backstop as standard, on the model already used for NTPC's supply into states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, rather than leaving each project to negotiate its own offtake security from scratch.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.