India to ship crude oil from Sakhalin-I
India will ship its share of crude oil from Russian oilfield Sakhalin-I in October-December this year, Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dinsha Patel said on Thursday.
"ONGC Videsh Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp, is planning to bring the first two cargoes of crude oil each having the capacity of approx 700,000 barrels from Sakhalin-I project in Russia into India in October and December, 2006," he said in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha here.
OVL has 20 per cent stake in the ExxonMobil-operated Sakhalin-I project in Far East Russia.
The company would auction the crude to Indian refiners. "The details of infrastructure viz., jetties, SBM and pipelines available with ONGC at Jawahardweep and offshore to facility auctioning of crude by ONGC are being assessed."
Patel said OVL shipped 256,000 tonnes of crude oil from its Sudan property to India in 2005-06.
OVL, which has 25 per cent stake in Greater Nile Oil Project in Sudan, had shipped 333,000 tonnes of crude from Sudan to India in 2004-05. It brought 818,000 tonnes of Sudanese crude in 2003-04.
The company is entitled to one-fourth of oil output from GNOP but has shipped only a small quantity of its entitlement as Indian refiners have not expressed willingness to process Sudanese crude. OVL sells the remaining of its share from GNOP in international market.
To another question, Patel said ONGC and its subsidiary Managalore Refinery and Petrochemical Ltd is examining the feasibility of setting up an export oriented refinery at Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh.
It is also exploring the techno-economic feasibility/viability of setting up of a well-head refinery for processing the crude oil discovered by the joint venture of Cairn Energy and ONGC in Rajasthan.
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