(PTI)
State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp has pushed back the start of natural gas production from its biggest project in KG basin to December 2019 as it reworked the USD 5.07 billion development to accommodate new policies like GST and local purchase preference rules. When ONGC Board had on March 28, 2016, approved investing USD 5.07 billion in bringing to production a cluster of discoveries in Bay of Bengal block KG-DWN-98/2 or KG-D5, the first gas was targeted for June 2019 and first oil was to flow by March 2020.But now, first gas is expected by December 2019 and oil by March 2021, according to the revised dates presented to the company’s board late last month.
“These are not new dates. They were out a couple of months back and we gave an update of the project to the board at its meeting on June 29,” ONGC Director (Offshore) Rajesh Kakkar said. The revised dates were set when ONGC spudded the first of the 34 wells under the project on April 8 this year.While the ONGC Board had in March 2016 approved a field development plan for Cluster-II discoveries in the block that sits next to Reliance Industries’ flagging KG-D6 block in Krishna Godavari basin, new policies like local purchase preference rules, including the one that mandates PSUs to source domestic iron and steel for infrastructure projects were formulated last year.
