ONGC is slowly but steadily moving towards putting the country’s east coast on the global map for areas that boast of hydrocarbon production from ultra-deepwater. It is simultaneously working towards inking production enhancement contracts with various contractors to boost output from other blocks too.

“Out of four appraisal wells (in ultra-deep find) planned, two wells have been drilled and both wells proved to be gas bearing. Production Testing Performance in these two wells is in line with expectation --- 7.5 lakh cubic metre per day approximately,” an official told BusinessLine.

In 2007, about 150 km off the Andhra Pradesh coast is ONGC’s ultra-deep water find, called UD-1, in the famous Krishna-Godavari block KG-DWN-98/2. The progress had been slow on this area of the block due to technological challenges that it was throwing up. ONGC earlier was looking at producing almost 20 million standard cubic metre a day by 2019-2020 from the area.

Simultaneously, ONGC is also taking its association with American giant Exxon to the next level and it doesn’t rule out partnering with the latter for ultra-deep find. In 2019 a Memorandum of Association (MOU) was inked between ONGC and Exxon.

During Phase-I, ONGC and Exxon were engaged in Joint Technical sessions to discuss and evaluate the Deep water areas of India and had finalised potential areas for collaboration in eastern and western coast of the Indian sedimentary basin.

The Phase-II entry letter and Confidentiality Agreement between the two were signed in May 2021. After the first kick-off meeting pertaining to Phase-II held on July 12, 2021, two Joint Technical Workshops have been conducted for West Coast and East Coast Collaboration areas. Data pertaining to East coast is in the process of exporting from the National Data Repository (NDR) for reprocessing by Exxon Mobil at their centre at Houston, USA, an official in the know said.

The next Steering Committee Meeting pertaining to Phase-II is planned soon where parties will look to align on mutually agreed collaboration areas for transition to Phase 3 (Joint Collaboration).

Meanwhile, to further boost its hydrocarbon output, ONGC is working on production enhancement contracts for six blocks. “As part of its Action Plan, ONGC has been planning for Tariff based production enhancement contract model for six fields,” another official said.

ONGC has chalked out a detailed exploration strategy and looking at yet to be tapped 14 sedimentary Basins – Narmada; Ganga-Punjab; Saurashtra- South Rewa; Cuddapah; Chattisgarh; Bastar; Deccan Syneclise; Bhima – Kaladgi; Pranhita-Godavari; Kerala Konkan; Andaman; Karewa; Spiti Zanskar; and in Bengal basin ONGC is consolidating the recent find through appraisal and moving through acreage acquisition under OALP and seismic data acquisition.

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