ONGC Boosts Operations Off India Via New, Expanded Deals Worth $60M

State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd. (ONGC) expanded the scope of its operational activities offshore India through new and expanded contracts, amounting to approximately $60 million, with two services providers.

Subsea services provider Seamec Ltd., a subsidiary of India's HAL Offshore, said Friday in a company announcement on the Bombay Stock Exchange that the scope of its activities has been expanded to meet ONGC's tender requirements and it will now deploy additional fleet assets for the contract.

The firm will deploy vessel SEAMEC II and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) together with personnel for the three-year long ONGC assignment, which is worth around $33.44 million.

Separately, Fugro Survey (India) Pvt Ltd. has bagged a $26 million offshore geotechnical site investigation contract for the KG-DWN-98/2 project offshore the east coast of India, the company said Friday in a press release.

Fugro's workscope comprises the gathering of site specific geotechnical and geohazard data to aid in the design and later installation of wellheads, manifolds, platforms, FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading) anchors, umbilicals, pipelines and flow lines within the field. The firm will deploy its deepwater geotechnical vessel, Fugro Voyager, to undertake work in water depths ranging from 164 feet (50 meters) to 4,921 feet (1,500 meters), commencing before the end of third quarter 2016.

Upon completion of the fieldwork, Fugro will carry extensive laboratory testing, data analysis, interpretation and integration with previous Fugro-acquired AUV Geophysical and Metocean data to provide site characterization reports.

In other development, ONGC is looking for buyers for gas produced from a new deepwater field -- the Vashishta & S1 -- in the Krishna-Godvari (KG) Basin located offshore India's east coast. The field is the first to supply gas under a new government policy that permit companies to charge a higher rate for output from fields that are complex and challenging to develop, local media The Economic Times reported Friday.

According to ONGC Director (Offshore) Tapas Sengupta, a well at Vashishta & S1 field has been in operations for about a month, producing around 17.66 million standard cubic feet per day (0.5 million standard cubic meters a day) of gas, which is now sold at the government-set domestic natural gas price of $3.06 per unit. While ONGC wants to fetch higher natural gas prices, current global prices may weigh on such hopes.

"This is a test case for ONGC. It is a challenge for ONGC to derive a strategy for getting the right price for all future production from deepwater fields," Sengupta said, as quoted in The Economic Times.



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