The Sharjah National Oil Company (SNOC), the government-owned firm conducting the emirate’s first-ever upstream licensing round, has received “good response” and “positive interest” from international exploration and production firms.

“We’ve already received quite a lot of registrations and we are confident that international energy companies will be interested in coming over and looking at what we have in Sharjah,” a source close to the campaign told MEED.

Sharjah on 25 June announced the launch of its licensing round, after the emirates of Ras al-Khaimah and Abu Dhabi launched their own earlier in the year.

Sharjah has offered an onshore acreage consisting of three gas-rich concession areas: A, B and C; with SNOC holding a 25 per cent stake in areas A and C, and 50 per cent in B.

The data rooms containing the seismic surveys and studies opened on 4 July, and will be open until 18 November, by which date companies have to submit their bids.

The virtual data rooms that include the seismic data workstation are available for free, and can be accessed from anywhere by any of the firms qualified and registered with SNOC for the licensing round.

An administration fee of $25,000 will be charged if registered companies wish to carry a copy of the licensed data to their offices for carrying out detailed studies and interpretation.

“After having acquired and processed the seismic data it really became clear that we are able to see things that we were not able to before. We spent a lot of time processing the data well, and now is a good time to use it,” the source said.

“Now is a good time to invest and that’s why we have approached international partners who have the expertise, the technology and the finance.”

SNOC has said it will evaluate the bids received by 18 November and issue commercial contracts effective from 1 January, 2019 “shortly thereafter”.

“The data rooms will be open throughout until mid-November. We expect the evaluation of bids to be a very simple process, as you can see in the tender document [made available on the website]. There is no lengthy negotiation process mentioned and no caveats. We expect to be able to announce the winning bidder and the runner-up shortly after all the bids have been submitted,” the source said.

The source did not reveal what the commercial terms of the agreements will, saying only that the details are contained in the data rooms.

“It would be safe to say that we [SNOC] are acting on advice from world experts and are confident that IOCs will see the terms as commercially attractive,” the source said.