The Hindu Business Line : Hardy Oil finds oil, gas in Cauvery offshore

Hardy Oil has a 75 per cent interest in the field. It is early days of the discovery and the operator company, Hardy Oil, is not yet ready to come out with estimates of how much oil and gas could be got out.

The Hardy Oil's President and CEO, Mr Sastry Karra, told Business Line on Monday that the exploratory well had encountered many hydrocarbons bearing sand layers at higher pressures, at various depths from 3,333 metres to 3,809 metres.

But more than the benefits to the shareholders of Hardy Oil and GAIL, the significance of the find lies in the fact that this is the last hydrocarbon discovery in Cauvery offshore after 1988, when ONGC discovered PY-3. "The fact that we have found hydrocarbons in this much-explored block, is significant," Mr Karra said.

PY-3 lies in the adjacent block called CY-OS/1 and is ring-fenced from the rest of the block. This oil field, once written off as unviable by experts, today produces about 6,000 barrels of oil a day. Hardy Oil is the operator of this field. In fact, so far 19 million barrels of oil (2.3 million tonnes) has been taken out of PY-3 and Mr Karra is confident that another 30 million barrels (4 mt) could be pumped out.

The discovery of hydrocarbons announced on Monday (at Fan-A-1 prospect in the CY-OS/2 block) raises hopes of Cauvery basin offshore area turning out into a larger oil and gas source. Currently, the strike looks more like a gas and condensate find than oil.

One implication of this is that gas from here could possibly be linked up with gas from PY-1 and PY-3 and transported onshore for use. PY-1 is a gas field and PY-3 is an oil field, which also produces gas — that is being burnt away now.

CY— OS/2 is a `pre-NELP' block — this means ONGC, as the original licensee, has an option to buy up to 30 per cent interest into the field.

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