ONGC approves $90-million development plan

Chennai: ONGC, which has a 40 per cent interest in the PY-3 oilfield in the Bay of Bengal, last week gave its approval for a $90-million development plan. Now that this long-awaited approval has come, the operator of the field, the UK-based Hardy Oil, plans to drill two more wells to produce oil.

Today, the field produces 4,000 barrels (500 tonnes) of oil a day. Once the project is complete, which is expected to happen by the end of 2008, PY-3 will produce 2,000 barrels more, Mr Sastry Karra, President & CEO, Hardy Oil, told Business Line today.

Mr Karra had said earlier that it is possible to get 4 million barrels of oil from PY-3 before the field dies out.

Four oil companies are partners in the PY-3 field-Hardy Oil of UK (18 per cent), Hindustan Oil Exploration Company (21 per cent), Tata Petrodyne (21 per cent) and ONGC (40 per cent).

Meanwhile, Hindustan Oil, the only partner-company that is listed in India, informed the stock exchanges today that production at PY-3, which had been suspended on December 18, has resumed. Earlier, production had to be stopped because the pipe supplying oil to the storage vessel had broken. This was attributed to bad weather conditions. It is learnt that production re-commenced on Friday.

However, the operator is not too worried over the 10-day loss of production. “Our uptime is over 95 per cent, which is pretty good in the oil industry,” Mr Karra said.