After investing nearly USD 1.2 billion over seven years with little success, the state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) is now seeking partners to help revive the Deen Dayal gas field in the KG basin in the Bay of Bengal.
On June 12, ONGC requested expressions of interest from global oil and gas companies with the necessary technical expertise and financial strength to become partners for developing a viable strategy for the field, according to the tender document.
The Deen Dayal West (DDW) gas/condensate field, discovered by Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) almost two decades ago, was one of the assets acquired by ONGC in 2017. Initially thought to hold up to 20 trillion cubic feet of in-place gas reserves, the field’s actual reserves were later revised to a tenth of the initial estimate. The field has presented significant technical challenges, with several wells yielding suboptimal performance and others encountering complications during drilling and completion.
ONGC is now in need of a partner with global expertise to aid in the development of the DDW field. In addition to the acquisition cost, ONGC has invested an undisclosed sum of money in its efforts to bring the field to production.
The KG-OSN-2001/3 block, which includes the DDW field, was awarded to GSPC and its partners in the first bid round of the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. The block houses five fields, among which DDW is under development.
The field, classified as high pressure high temperature (HP-HT), is estimated to hold around 55 billion cubic meters (1.94 Tcf) of gas in place. ONGC plans to revise the previous field development plan submitted to authorities.
The company aims to receive bids by September 12 in the pursuit of technical expertise to plot a way forward for the future development of the field.
Despite initial plans to use existing facilities for neighboring blocks, ONGC never utilized the infrastructure and instead constructed new ones. The projected production for DDW, as per GSPC’s field development plan submitted in 2009, was 200-300 million cubic feet a day, but the actual output has been significantly lower.