By Shirish Nadkarni
OGJ correspondent
MUMBAI, July 14 -- India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp.(ONGC) plans to kick off a $390 million deepwater exploration program for 2003-04 with the drilling of three wells off the country' s eastern coast, and two off the western coast.
These represent part of the 35 wells that the state-owned exploration and production giant hopes to drill ear in the acreage awarded to it under the first three rounds of the New Exploration Licensing Policy.
"The expenditure on each deepwater well is expected to be in the region of 800 million to 1 billion rupees," said Kharak Singh, ONGC' s executive director and asset manager for Mumbai High.
"We have decided to focus on deepwater exploration to increase our crude production," he said. "We are in the process of hiring two rigs for our exploration activities."
The corporation had to defer a plan to start exploratory drilling in its Bengal offshore block, however, due to its inability to locate a suitable rig for deepwater exploration.
After calling for global tenders that were unsatisfactory, the company has decided to rebid the work later in the year. It will resume drilling in the Bengal offshore block in the next fiscal year after the monsoon ends.
"We are going all out on the exploration front, and plan to invest another 17 billion rupees to develop three discovered fields in India," said Singh.
"We will also open up our oil and gas fields for exploration to other companies, so that our crude production can be increased, " he added. "We expect to spend about $1.2 billion every year in exploration-related activities."
In addition, ONGC announced this week that it has placed a $220 million order with South Korea' s Hyundai Heavy Industries for a gas processing platform for its Mumbai High flagship oilfield.
Hyundai, the world' s largest shipbuilder, will build the 14,000 tonne gas compression platform and install it in the field about 160 km west of Mumbai. The "MSP" platform will be linked via bridge to the existing Mumbai High South platform off India's western coast. It will have facilities for gas compression, dehydration, treatment, utility, and oil handling, the company said in a statement.
The work scope includes modifications to existing platforms and decommissioning of a flare system, which Hyundai said it would subcontract to an Indian company.
The award is part of ONGC's $2 billion redevelopment program to boost production at the Arabian Sea field to 300,000 b/d from 200,000 b/d of crude. Output from Mumbai High was 400,000 b/d at its peak in the mid to late 1980s.