RIL's KG-D6 output again drops: Oil Ministry

Output has dropped to 13.28 mmscmd from 13.63 mmscmd

After two months of increase, natural gas production from Reliance Industries' eastern offshore KG-D6 block has again started to drop.

Output, which had risen to 13.63 million standard cubic meters per day in February, has dropped to 13.28 mmscmd this month, the Directorate General of Hydrocarbon (DGH) said in a production status report to the Oil Ministry.

RIL produced a total of 13.58 mmscmd of gas from Dhirubhai-1 and 3 gas fields and MA oil and gas field in the KG-DWN-98/3 or KG-D6 block in Bay of Bengal in the first week of February, which rose to 13.63 mmscmd in the following week.

However, output has since dropped to 13.28 mmscmd in the week ending March 9, it said.

This output is made up of 8.17 mmscmd from D1&D3 and 5.11 mmscmd from MA field.

RIL had in January began production from the MA-8 well on the MA oil and gas field to help reverse the declining trend in output from the KG-D6 block. The well added over 1.5 mmscmd to the output to take MA production to 5.33 mmscmd last month.

Production at KG-D6 had last month dropped to just about 11.7 mmscmd and MA-8 has helped reverse the falling trend of the past three years.

RIL, which is the operator of the block with 60% interest, has so far drilled 22 wells on D1&D3 fields but has put only 18 on production so far. During the week under review, "total 8 wells were on production and 10 wells were kept closed", the DGH report said.

BP of UK has 30% stake while Canada's Niko Resources the remaining 10%.

Out of 7 wells on MA field, 5 wells are on production. "One well, named MA-6H is under work-over (repair) since January 16, 2014. Another well namely, MA-7H is kept under shut-in," it said.

Of the 13.28 mmscmd of cumulative production, 12.58 mmscmd was sold to fertiliser plants and the remaining 0.7 mmscmd gas was consumed by the East-West pipeline which transports the fuel from east coast to the west, the report said.

The KG-D6 fields, which began gas production in April 2009, hit a peak output of 69.43 mmscmd in March 2010 before water and sand ingress shut down well after well.

D1&D3, the largest of the 18 gas discoveries in the KG-D6 block, produced 66.35 mmscmd, while 3.07 mmscmd was the output from the MA field, the only oil discovery on the block.

Besides the fall in output from D1&D3, gas production from the MA field, which had hit a peak of 6.78 mmscmd in January 2012, has dropped.

The company has so far made 19 gas and one oil discovery in the Krishna Godavari basin block in the Bay of Bengal. While the lone oil find, MA went on stream in September 2008, D1 & D3 were put into production in April 2009.