MUMBAI : More than a decade after being put to production, Reliance Industries shuttered its D1/D3 gas field in the KG-D6 block on Monday as the field ceased to produce, the company said.
Touted as India’s first deep-water gas field located in the Bay of Bengal, D1/D3 was put to production in April 2009.
Production started declining from April 2010 after hitting a peak of 61.43 millionmetric standard cubic meters per day (mmscmd) in March 2010. RIL had an estimated 10 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas, but due to the reservoir’s complexity and sand and water ingress, production declined. Last quarter, the field produced an average of just 1.5 mmscmd.
In February 2011, British oil major BP Plc had paid $7.2 billion for a 30% share in 23 oil and gas blocks operated by RIL, including KG-D6. RIL has a 66.6% stake in KG-D6, while BP holds the rest.
When RIL found gas in the KG-D6 block in 2002, it was touted as the world’s largest natural gas find that year and India’s largest in 30 years.
In a record seven years, RIL brought the field on stream and began production from D1 and D3 in April 2009 with an investment of $9 billion in developing the block.
In September 2018, RIL had shuttered its only oilfield (MA field) in the D6 block in the Krishna Godavari (KG) basin due to lack of production. The field has cumulatively produced about 0.53 TCF of gas and 31.4 million barrels of oil and condensate. It has no remaining reserves.
RIL and BP had, over the years, kept D1 and D3 alive with over $1 billion investment and nearly two dozen technological interventions.
KG-D6 produced about 3 tcf equivalent, saving about $30 billion in energy imports.
RIL, along with BP, is now investing ₹35,000 crore toward monetising another 3 tcf equivalent (about 500 million barrels of oil equivalent) reserves from three projects—R cluster, Satellite Cluster and MJ fields—in the KG-D6 block.
“The first gas from these fields is expected in mid-2020. The peak production from these three fields is expected to reach 1 BCFe per day, which is about 15% of the then envisaged India’s demand," RIL said.
