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| Essar Oil's commercial CBM production delayed by a month |
| Devjyot Ghoshal / Kolkata Mar 08, 2010, 00:57 IST |
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Days after Ruias-promoted Essar Oil announced that its coal bed methane (CBM) blocks hold more than double the previous estimates, the company's exploration and production arm has indicated that commencement of commercial CBM production from its block at Ranigunj has been pushed back by a month.
“Commercial production (from the Ranigunj CBM block) will begin by April-end or May. There has been a bit of slippage during the laying of the pipelines,” Essar Exploration & Production, Chief Operating Officer (Clean Coal Business) Prem Sawhney told Business Standard.
In January this year, the company had said that it was aiming at producing between 50,000-1,00,000 cubic meter of gas per day from its Ranigunj block towards the end of March, which it intends to transporting to user industries through 40 km of pipelines.
“The work on the pipelines is ongoing and should be complete in about a month,” Sawhney added.
Essar's Ranigunj block is in proximity to a number of steel and power plants, apart from the Asansol-Durgapur industrial belt. “We have already got two consumers, one of which is Phillips Carbon (Black), and we are in talks with a number of other firms,” Sawhney said.
Phillips Carbon Black Limited, part of the RPG Group, is the leading producer of carbon black in the country. Its Durgapur unit, with an annual production capacity of 1,35,000 MT, contributes about 24 per cent of the company's overall capacity.
On Friday, in an announcement on the BSE website, Essar Oil said that it had “aggregate in-place CBM resource of 15 tcf (trillion cubic feet) and recoverable CBM resources of around 7 tcf.” Of this, the Ranigunj block has about 4.6 tcf, with approximately 1 tcf of recoverable resources.
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