The Rajya Sabha was informed that the state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) will begin commercial production of crude oil in May of next year from its much-delayed flagship deepsea project in the Krishna Godavari basin.
In a written reply to a question, Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Rameswar Teli said ONGC's KG basin project, KG-DWN-98/2, is in "challenging geology".
Delays have occurred due to multiple challenges and issues in actual project implementation such as subsurface geological issues, shifting of well locations and surface facilities/processing platform, delays and disruption in project supply chain for vendors spread across multiple countries due to Covid-19 pandemic and challenging weather conditions.
The KG-DWN-98/2 or KG-D5 block, which sits next to Reliance Industries' KG-D6 block in the KG basin, has a number of discoveries that have been clubbed into clusters. Located 35 kilometres off the coast of Andhra Pradesh in water depths ranging from 300-3,200 metres, the discoveries in the block are divided into Cluster-1, 2 and 3. Cluster 2 is being put to production first.