India's Oil Fields Are Running Down. The Policy to Squeeze More Out of Them Is Eight Years Old, and Its Best Techniques Are Still Pilots.

Domestic crude output fell from 36.96 to 28.70 million tonnes in a decade, and most of what is left sits in fields that have been producing for forty years. Getting more oil out of an old field is a solved problem in engineering — waterflood, polymer, gas injection, steam — and India has had a Cabinet-approved policy to pay for it since October 2018. What the policy has bought so far is one full-field polymer flood at ONGC, one commercial chemical flood at Vedanta's Mangala, a CO₂ feasibility study, and a great deal of screening. The technologies that would move the national number are the ones still at pilot scale.

Recovery factor is the number that matters, and India's is low

A field's recovery factor is the share of the oil originally in place that will ever be produced. Primary recovery — reservoir pressure pushing oil to the well — typically yields 10–20%. Secondary recovery, chiefly injecting water to sweep oil toward producers, takes it to the 30–40% range that most mature fields worldwide sit in. Everything beyond that is tertiary or "enhanced" recovery, and it is where the arithmetic gets interesting: on a field with 3.6 billion barrels in place, like Vedanta's Mangala in Rajasthan, each additional percentage point of recovery is 36 million barrels — more than a year of the field's output.

The terminology matters and is routinely conflated. Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) covers the standard toolkit a competent operator already uses: waterflooding, infill drilling, well workovers, artificial lift. Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) means changing the physics in the reservoir — heat, chemicals or injected gas — and is genuinely harder, dearer and rarer. A policy that rewards "ER/IR" together is paying, in part, for things operators should be doing anyway.

The compendium: what each technique does, and where it stands

Mechanisms and global status are standard reservoir-engineering reference material (NETL, SPE); India status reflects only what this piece could locate — see caveats. Vedanta's claim that ASP lifts recovery "up to 60%" versus "40% with polymer alone" is the company's own framing of the technology's potential, not a measured Mangala result, and is not adopted here.

What the 2018 policy actually pays for

The Union Cabinet approved the Policy Framework to Promote and Incentivize Enhanced Recovery Methods for Oil and Gas in October 2018, covering enhanced recovery, improved recovery and unconventional hydrocarbons. Its terms, per the Cabinet release and DGH's framework document:

• Fiscal incentive on oil: the ₹4,500-per-tonne cess on crude from nomination fields (ONGC's and OIL's legacy fields, and Vedanta's Rajasthan block) is halved for oil produced through approved ER/IR projects.
• Fiscal incentive on gas: a 75% discount on royalty for ER-project gas.
• Duration: the policy sunsets ten years from notification; the incentives run for 120 months from the start of production in each project.
• Gatekeeping: mandatory screening of every field for ER potential by designated institutions, and a mandatory pilot before commercial implementation; an ER Committee of MoPNG, DGH, industry and academic members monitors it.

Two things follow. First, the incentive is structured as a discount on levies that only apply to nomination-era fields, so it is a targeted subsidy to the oldest producing acreage — which is where the recovery-factor problem actually lives. Second, the mandatory screen-then-pilot sequence, sensible as engineering, means the policy's early years were always going to produce studies rather than barrels. A December 2024 Business Standard report said a modified policy to revive ageing fields was expected in 2025; this piece could not establish whether it has been notified.

Where the barrels are actually coming from

Three named efforts account for nearly everything concrete this piece could find.

Mangala (Vedanta / Cairn Oil & Gas, Rajasthan). India's largest onshore field, producing since 2009, with roughly 3.6 billion barrels in place and a recovery factor around 30%. Cairn ran polymer injectivity tests and a chemical-EOR pilot in 2012, an ASP pilot reported as a success in 2016, and moved to what it calls India's largest commercial ASP injection — among very few full-scale ASP floods anywhere. In August 2026 Vedanta announced a US$200 million FY27 capex plan specifically to accelerate recovery at Mangala. This is the one Indian field where tertiary chemical EOR is a production line rather than an experiment.

Bechraji, Mehsana (ONGC, Gujarat). After four years of extended polymer-flood pilots, ONGC awarded SNF Flopam India a ₹547 crore (about US$59 million) contract in April 2026 for "Polymer Injection Facilities — Phase 2": design, supply, commissioning and ten years of operation of a full-field polymer flood. A separate surfactant-polymer pilot — a five-spot pattern, six months of surfactant slug then two and a half years of chase polymer — has been running there since March 2023, with results presented at ADIPEC 2025.

Gandhar (ONGC with IOCL, Gujarat) and Hazira/Dahej. CO₂-EOR has been studied, not deployed: laboratory and simulation work at ONGC's Institute of Reservoir Studies suggests 10–15% incremental recovery at Gandhar if industrial CO₂ can be captured and injected, and ONGC has framed it as a combined CCUS-and-blue-hydrogen demonstration. The Hazira/Dahej pilot, sourcing CO₂ from nearby industrial emitters, was covered on this blog as a storage project with an EOR side-objective; it remains at MoU-and-consultant stage in the sources reached.

Why this matters more than new blocks

This blog has tracked the exploration side: 172 OALP blocks awarded, $4.36 billion pledged, one block in production. Exploration is a decade-long bet on finding something. Recovery-factor work is a bet on oil that is already found, mapped and connected to a pipeline. On a 3.6-billion-barrel field, moving recovery from 30% to 35% is 180 million barrels — comparable to the entire proved reserve of a respectable new discovery, at a fraction of the finding cost and risk. That is the case for treating the ER policy with the same scrutiny this blog applies to PLI and other incentive schemes: not whether the idea is right (it is), but what the money has bought, and why the highest-leverage technique on the compendium is still a slide deck.

What would fix this

The engineering is not the constraint; the incentive design and the sequencing are.

• Notify the modified policy with a clock on it. The 2018 framework's screen-then-pilot-then-commercial gate is sound but has no deadlines. A revised policy should set a maximum interval between screening and pilot, and between a successful pilot and a commercial decision, after which the incentive lapses for that field. Eight years of studies is a design outcome, not an accident.
• Pay per incremental barrel, not per levy waived. A cess discount rewards production that would have happened anyway on any field that clears the ER label. An incentive paid on production above a DGH-certified baseline decline curve rewards only the barrels the technique actually added — and is auditable.
• Build one CO₂-EOR hub, deliberately, at Gandhar. The pieces already exist separately: ONGC's simulation work, IOCL's nearby refinery as a CO₂ source, and a national CCUS-pipeline debate with no anchor customer. Funding the pipeline and the injection well as one project would give India its first CO₂ injection and its first paying use for captured carbon in the same stroke.
• Publish recovery factors field by field. DGH holds them. A public table of original-oil-in-place, cumulative production and recovery factor for every nomination field would let anyone see where the upside is, and would make the incentive's results checkable without a Parliament question.
• Keep electrical EOR in the lab for now. The honest reading of the evidence is that it is pilot-stage everywhere; an Indian programme should fund a monitored pilot on a heavy-oil block, not a commercial incentive.

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

What this piece does and doesn't cover

• It does not give a national recovery-factor figure. A figure around 28–30% for India against 35–40% globally is widely repeated but this piece could not trace it to a primary source and does not print it as fact; the Mangala field-level figure stands in.
• It corrects a date this blog's own planning notes had wrong: the policy was approved in October 2018, not 2022. Whether the modified policy trailed for 2025 has been notified, and on what terms, is not established here.
• ONGC's wider ER programme is under-represented. ONGC has run polymer, MEOR and thermal work at several Gujarat fields (Kalol, Sanand, Ankleshwar, Santhal) over decades; the sources reached did not give current commercial status for them, so they are not listed as deployments. Absence from this piece is not evidence of absence in the field.
• Every figure came through this account's web-search tool, not a direct read. PIB, DGH, MoPNG and OnePetro were all unreachable from this environment. Contract values, dates and capacities are as reported in trade coverage (World Oil, Chemical Industry Digest, SNF's own release, Business Standard/ANI) and conference abstracts, not re-verified against the primary documents.
• Vendor and operator claims are labelled as such and not adopted: the "up to 60%" ASP figure, and the 10–15% CO₂-EOR simulation result, are potentials stated by interested parties, not measured outcomes.

Sources: Cabinet approval of the Policy Framework to Promote and Incentivize Enhanced Recovery Methods for Oil and Gas (PIB release ID 183408; pmindia.gov.in), October 2018, and DGH's published framework document (January 2018 draft) for the cess/royalty terms, 10-year sunset, 120-month incentive window, screening and pilot requirements and ER Committee; DGH's stakeholder-engagement page on the IOR–EOR policy; Business Standard, 25 December 2024, on the modified policy expected in 2025. Mangala: Vedanta/Cairn press releases and SPE Improved Oil Recovery Conference papers (2012 pilot, 2016 ASP pilot results, 2020 large-scale ASP planning), MarketScreener and Chemical Weekly on the commercial ASP start, Business Standard/ANI on the August 2026 US$200 million FY27 plan. ONGC: SNF's release and Chemical Industry Digest on the ₹547 crore Bechraji Phase 2 award (April 2026); SPE ADIPEC 2025 abstract on the Bechraji surfactant-polymer pilot; SPG India 2024 paper on the Gandhar CO₂-EOR/CCUS/blue-hydrogen concept. Electrical EOR: "A Review of Electrically Enhanced Oil Recovery (EEOR)," ACS Omega 10(50), 2025. Recovery-mechanism reference: NETL and SPE standard material. All located via search; none directly fetched (see 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.