ON ONGC RADAR

Calcutta, Aug. 30: State-run explorer ONGC Ltd plans the biggest ever oil-and-gas hunt in Bengal from the end of this year.

Spanning an area of more than 16,500sqkm, the hunt will cover the districts of Nadia, Hooghly, Burdwan, Birbhum, Malda and North Dinajpur.

The company expects to bag five onland blocks in the latest round of the international bidding process through which the Centre awards prospective hydrocarbon assets in the country.

“We hope to boost our presence in this state significantly,” ONGC chairman R.S. Sharma said in Calcutta.

So far, ONGC’s five-decade efforts to find hydrocarbon in Bengal at close to 50 locations have borne no fruit.

D.K. Pandey, director (exploration), ONGC, said the perception was that the company needed to drill deeper to get lucky in Bengal. “Whatever we have done so far has been in the shallow horizon. If we go deeper, there is a good chance,” Pandey said.

ONGC has never drilled beyond 4,000 metres in Bengal but plans to go deeper this time. It plans to spend about Rs 10,000 crore over the next five years to carry out the exploration.

The Centre is likely to award ONGC the five blocks by the end of September. The legal formalities of the handover are expected to take another three months.

By then, of course, the company would have taken the first step required before any exploration: the gathering of seismic data for analysis and interpretation. This enables the explorer to make an initial assessment of whether there is enough hydrocarbon under the ground to be produced commercially.

Pandey said ONGC was working out how much area to cover in the survey. He added that the chances were that there would be natural gas rather than oil.

“Geologically, the area looks interesting. We are keeping our fingers crossed. This is a virgin area, there’s hardly any data available,” he said.

The company does not expect any public resistance in these densely populated districts since the work would not lead to any significant land acquisition at the exploratory stage. It hopes to drill about 10 exploratory wells, each taking up about 1-2 acres.

Company officials said they would take the plots on rent and pay a handsome compensation. Only if a block starts producing commercially, the company will move to acquire a larger area. That possibility still remains several years away.