ONGC puts MP on India’s oil and gas map

Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) first struck gas at a well at Nohta in Damoh district of Madhya Pradesh in early 2012.

Nearly two years down the line, the state-owned company reported ‘initial discovery’ of gas in all four wells in the Damoh-Jabera-Katni nomination block, near Jabalpur.

“It’s a major discovery. We have got gas in last four wells. The testing results are reported to the upstream regulator,” N.K. Verma, Director Technical of ONGC, told Business Line . To establish the commerciality of the onshore find, the company is now drilling five more appraisal wells in the block.

Appraisal wells are drilled around a strike to ensure the size of a discovery as a precondition for developing the asset. “We are still in the exploratory phase. However, to expedite things, we are drilling appraisal wells,” Verma said. From the end-use perspective, gas finds are more potent to attract industrial investments to a region. The Damoh find, if viable, may bring about a major change in the industrial scene of Madhya Pradesh.

But extracting gas may not be easy. The exploratory asset is located in the Vindhyan basin, in the valley of river Son. Geologically, the region is dated back to Proterozoic era, nearly 200 million years before the first Dinosaur. It was time when the Earth was on a churn and the region underwent a series of volcanic eruptions. While that makes the Vindhyan basin a great study for palaeontologists, the hydrocarbon resources of the region are concealed under nearly 2 km thick hard rock cover. Naturally, such assets do not find many takers in the auction rounds. “It’s an extremely challenging asset. The rock cover is nearly 400 million years old and difficult to drill. But we have deployed the cutting edge technology of air drilling, air-hammer drilling and thermo-drilling to have a breakthrough,” the ONGC official said.

In other words, it will take a long time and require high investments to produce gas from such blocks. While the forthcoming gas price rise will act as an incentive to intensify hydrocarbon search in the region, it will surely take time to make the gas flowing.

But till that happens, ONGC may come up with more encouraging news from another such challenging acreage. “We are expecting a breakthrough in the Himalayas,” Verma said.

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