State-run ONGC is taking steps to recover oil and gas from tough reservoirs in India using high end technology.
As part of this initiative, the firm set up a ‘Centre of Delivery’ for HPHT and ‘tight’ reservoirs in November 2012.
The centre is headquartered in Chennai, because the eight fields identified are in the South — five in the Krishna-Godavari basin and three in the Cauvery basin.
The company also set up similar centres for shale oil and gas (Vadodara) and coal-bed methane (Dehradun).
The company identified seven oilfields in the South and these hold 350 million tonne of oil or oil-equivalent gas, but mostly gas. But the firm could recover only 50 million tonne with the technology now available.
With latest technology, the firm aims to produce about 5 million tonne from these reservoirs, which is akin to increasing the production of Bombay High by 25 per cent.
These oilfields have unmanageably high pressures (HP), or high temperatures (HT), or both. These are ‘HPHT’ reservoirs and petroleum engineers have been eyeing these reservoirs the way a cat eyes fish in a glass tank.
Among other challenges, a high temperature reservoir is at least 350 F hot, nearly twice as hot as boiling water, making it difficult to introduce electronic logging equipment in it.
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