HPCL, consortium to develop oilfields for ONGC

New Delhi, Sept 28: ONGC has signed a service contract for the development of its three offshore marginal fields with a consortium of Prize Petroleum Company Ltd (PPCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) and Malaysia-based M3Energy Berhad.

Awarded under an international competitive bid, the contract is for the development of three offshore marginal fields under Cluster-7 (B-192, B-45 and WO-24) in southwest of Mumbai High fields of ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation).

''Since marginal fields, that have low oil and gas reserves, cannot be explored economically on a stand alone basis, we thought of outsourcing them to other companies through the bidding process This is the first such block which has been awarded through this process,'' ONGC Director (Onshore) A K Hazarika told reporters here in the absence of Director (Offshore).

ONGC had offered 19 clusters for development through service contract in the first phase but received bids for two clusters.

The company has adopted similar process for the development of its onshore marginal fields.

The consortium companies have planned 166 million dollars of capital expenditure (capex) and 313 million dollars of operational expenditure (opex) for the exploration of 46.42 MMbbl of oil and 2.7 BCM of gas.

The consortium expects to extract oil and gas from the cluster for atleast 12-15 years.

''We have projected extraction of 18,865 bopd of oil and 0.887 MMm3 of gas per day for the period for at least 12 to 15 years with 10 years of peak production,'' Prize Petroleum CEO M N Prasad said.

Prize Petroleum, which is an upstream arm of HPCL, is the consortium leader and will be responsible for carrying oout geological and geophysical surveys, log and seismic interpretations, reservoir management and production facilities for the development of the fields, he added.

M3Energy will look after the production and processing related operations while HPCL will do the project management and related activities.

''Out of the total expenditure, HPCL will share 60 per cent while Prize Petroleum and M3Energy will share 10 per cent and 30 per cent respectively,'' HPCL's Chairman and MD Mahesh B Lal said.

According to the agreement between the partner companies, the oil and gas exploration project will be completed in two phases. In the first phase, which will be spread across three years, initial development will be carried out and in the second phase, exploration will be carried out till the end of the field's economic life.

UNI

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