Seven years after the Bombay High North (BHN) offshore platform in the Mumbai High oil field was destroyed, ONGC has replaced it with an Rs 6,060 crore, new platform and processing facility.
On July 27 2005, BHN platform – located about 100 nautical miles from Mumbai’s coastline – was completely gutted in a major fire claiming 22 lives. It was the most serious accident in the company’s history.
The Chairman and Managing Director of the company Sudhir Vasudeva, inaugurating the new platform and processing facility on Sunday, said that it will increase the oil production from the Mumbai High fields by 9,000 barrels a day (bpd). The current production is 2,06,000 bpd.
The new platform and facility has been named as MHN and it will lead to a production of 55 million tonnes of oil and 6.5 billion cubic meters of gas by 2030. Due to the facility, the hydrocarbon recovery factor will increase from 24 per cent to 40 per cent, Vasudeva said.
The hydrocarbon recovery factor indicates the amount of oil and gas, which can possibly be extracted from an oil field.
Even from the best oil field all the oil and gas cannot be recovered, some of it always gets left in the ground.
Vasudeva said that the company had planned to rebuild the platform in three years but it got delayed due to sharp increase in the prices of various engineering services required for the reconstruction.
The record oil prices in the international market also added to the delay, he said.
Green Foray
Vasudeva also said that the company is also looking at venturing into offshore wind turbines.
Currently studies are under way for assessing the potential of setting such turbines on the western coast of the country.
A pilot project with vertical axis wind turbine could be set up at Daman on Gujarat’s coast by 2015. Producing wind energy is expensive, it needs more support from the Union Ministry of Non-conventional Energy, he said.