The Hindu : ONGC launches deep sea hunt for oil

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 04, 2003

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ONGC launches deep sea hunt for oil

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI Aug. 3. The public sector Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) today announced the launch of a hunt for hydrocarbon reserves in the deep seas to augment the country's stagnating domestic oil production. With imports now constituting more than 70 per cent of India's oil needs, the premier national oil exploration company has decided to spend billions of dollars to achieve the goal of ultimately producing an additional one billion tonnes of oil and gas.

Outlining the company's plans today, the ONGC chairman, Subir Raha, said the project called `Sagar Samriddhi' involved investing $ 2.6 million a day in the hunt. The aim was to find about 11 billion tonnes of oil and oil equivalent gas reserves lying unexplored in deep waters. Mr. Raha said the target was to add four billion tonnes of reserves from the deap sea exploration campaign. If the ONGC could produce one-fourth of these reserves, he said the country would have one billion tonnes of oil and oil equivalent gas over 25 to 30 years. At $ 20 a barrel, he estimated that the revenues from this kind of production would be Rs. 644,000 crores.

He told newspersons that the ONGC planned to drill 47 exploratory wells in its blocks in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. For this purpose, it had hired Discoverer Seven Seas rig from Transocean Inc. of the U.S. and the Belford Dolphin from Dolphin Drilling of the U.K. besides its inhouse Sagar Vijay rig for the deep water campaign.

The ONGC estimates that its existing current crude oil production of 26 million tonnes can rise to 49 million tonnes by 2011-12 and 62 million tonnes by 2016-17 as a result of discoveries expected from the campaign. Similarly, gas production can almost double from the present 65 million standard cubic metre a day over the same period.

Mr. Raha said the ONGC's Sagar Vijay rig, capable of drilling up to 900 metres below the sea bed, would spud the first well in the Krishna Godavari basin, off the Andhra coast, in October. Belford Dolphin will drill in depths up to 3000 metres in the Bay of Bengal from November while Discoverer Seven Seas will drill in depths up to 1500 metres in the Arabian Sea in February next year. Giving details of the payment being made for the deep sea rigs, Mr. Raha said $ 0.75 million a day would be paid for these sophisticated rigs while another $ 0.2 million would be spent daily on the Sagar Ratna rig, $ 0.3 million a day on associated services and $ 1.3 million a day on the 26 jack-up rigs. Pre-drilling seismic surveys and well locations had been identified, he said.

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