ONGC goes for quick fix to pump up output at wells

NEW DELHI: For years flagship explorer ONGC has been a favourite whipping boy for failing to pump up volumes. But with the Modi government's stress on "skill, scale and speed" to kick-start economic growth, the flagship explorer is resorting to 'jugaad' (Indian ingenuity for fixing problems) to script a turnaround.

Oil production is already up 10% and daily volumes this month are at a five-year-high.

Chairman D K Sarraf said ONGC was confident of achieving annual volumes of 29 million tonnes by 2019-20, a rise of 23% from current levels.

ONGC's fortunes depend largely on western offshore fields. "We decided to go for the low-hanging fruits first — B193 near Bassein, D1 and Cluster 7 near Mumbai High," director offshore T K Sengupta said.

One of the measures was using submersible pumps in B139. But acid is injected into wells after inserting the pump and failed to penetrate the bottom layers of oil because of the pump. "So we decided to reverse the process and inject acid before putting the submersible pump. It worked," Sengupta said. Each well where this method was used is pumping 2,100-3,000 bpd, up from 600 bpd earlier.

B139 is also typical because of extremely high sulphur content of 20,000 parts per million.

In Cluster 7, 3-4 wells were idling because there was no processing facility. So ONGC decided to go for a FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading) facility. But the FPSO could not sail because of the monsoon. ONGC decided not to lose time and to start production "using some innovative methods" and is pumping between 8,000 bpd and 12,000 bpd.