Shirish Nadkarni
OGJ Correspondent
MUMBAI, Oct. 16 -- A consortium of oil companies and contractors is looking to spend more than $450 million to develop a cluster of small oil fields off India.
India's state-owned Oil & Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) has signed a service contract with Prize Petroleum Co. Ltd., Hindustan Petroleum Corp., and Trenergy (Malaysia) Bhd. to develop marginal fields southwest of Mumbai.
The three companies intend to invest $166 million in capital and $313 million in operating expenditures to develop three fields, B-192, B-45, and WO-24, which are part of ONGC's Cluster 7.
Trenergy subsidiary M3Energy will supply a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel for the project and will hold 30% of the service contract.
Prize and HPC together will own 70% of the contract and will be responsible for the reservoir management and drilling the required wells. As many as 13 wells are to be drilled into the three fields, potentially from three rigs or platforms under the 3-year assessment period.
The fields will then be fully developed, with estimated peak production of 18,865 b/d. ONGC says reserves in the three fields could be 46.5 million bbl of oil and 2.7 billion cu m of gas.
ONGC is in the first round of outsourcing the development of 19 offshore marginal fields through service contracts.
