State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) on Sunday said it has opened another well on its flagship deep-sea project in Krishna Godavari basin in Bay of Bengal, which will help augment production of crude oil and natural gas.
In January this year, ONGC had started producing oil, which is converted into fuels like petrol and diesel in refineries, from the KG-DWN-98/2 or KG-D5 block.
“On August 24, 2024, ONGC marked a significant milestone by starting production from its fifth oil well in the Block KG-DWN-98/2 Cluster-2 asset,” the firm said in a stock exchange filing on Sunday.
“Leveraging the floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel, ONGC has begun transporting and sale of associated gas, all the while underscoring its commitment to achieving zero gas flaring.”
It, however, did not state how much the new well was producing.
With this, ONGC also successfully commissioned its gas export line from the offshore-to-onshore terminal.
“Earlier in January, oil production commenced from the same asset, with 4 of 13 wells already flowing. Gas production is also advancing, with 3 of 7 wells online,” it added.
The block, which sits next to Reliance Industries’ KG-D6 block in the KG basin, has a number of discoveries that have been clubbed into clusters.
Located 35 kilometres off the coast of Andhra Pradesh in water depths ranging from 300-3,200 metres, the discoveries in the block are divided into Cluster-1, 2 and 3. Cluster 2 is being put to production first.
As per original plans, oil production from Cluster-2 should have begun by November 2021, but was delayed because of the Covid pandemic.
Thereafter, ONGC set May 2023 as the first Cluster-2 oil production deadline but then extended it to August 2023 and thereafter extended the flow of first oil every month, with the last deadline announced being December 2023. Oil started flowing from January 7, 2024.
At the time of start of production in January, ONGC had stated that peak or maximum production from the field is expected to be 45,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) and over 10 million standard cubic meters per day (mmscd) of gas which is used to make fertilisers, generate electricity, turned into CNG for use as fuel in automobiles and piped to household kitchens for cooking.
In an investor call on August 6, ONGC Director (Finance) Vivek Tongaonkar had stated that the firm was producing 12,000 bopd and 0.4 mmscmd of gas from the eastern offshore block.
This production was from four wells and one more well was planned to be opened in August, he had said.
This well would not just raise the oil production but also help increase the amount of natural gas which flows out with oil, to 1.5 mmscmd.
“And subsequently, from the third quarter (October-December 2024), we expect to open further wells, which would add to our oil production as much.
