Oil Minister HS Puri re-dedicated ONGC’s Sagar Samrat to the nation as a Mobile Offshore Production Unit (MOPU), which will handle up to 20,000 barrels per day (BPD) of crude oil and is expected to add 6,000 BPD to India’s production.
The ceremony, which took place aboard the Sagar Samrat on Saturday, was also attended by Oil Secretary Pankaj Jain and ONGC Chairman Arun Kumar Singh. The platform will be able to operate in deep waters as well as will open up new opportunities to access previously untapped reserves.
Sagar Samrat now rules the sea as a MOPU. Built in 1973, it was instrumental in 14 key offshore oil and gas discoveries as well as drilled around 125 wells, Puri tweeted.
“This state-of-the-art facility will handle up to 20,000 BPD of crude oil, with a maximum export gas capacity of 2.36 million cubic meters per day and is expected to add 6,000 BPD of oil to India’s production in the coming days,” the Minister noted.
Initially a jack-up drilling rig, Sagar Samrat has now been converted into a MOPU. The British engineering and consulting conglomerate Wood Group’s Mustang unit based in Texas carried out the front-end engineering and design for the vessel’s conversion.
It commenced production on December 23, 2022. The vessel is presently deployed at Western Offshore (WO)-16 field, located 140-145 kms west of Mumbai.
Located adjacent to the ONGC’s existing WO-16 wellhead platform (WHP) in 76m of water depth, the vessel will be instrumental in producing from marginal fields in the WO cluster thereby augmenting production from Western Offshore.
The Minister informed that the government intends to increase India’s exploration acreage to 0.5 million sq km by 2025 and 1 million sq km by 2030.
Government has been successful in reducing the ‘No Go’ area by 99 per cent, thereby making available around 1 million sq km of India’s EEZ for exploration, he added.
Several MNCs like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Total Energies are showing keen interest to invest in the Indian exploration and production (E&P) segment, and some are already in talks with ONGC for firming up mutually beneficial partnerships, Puri said.