FPSO woes halt operations at ONGC’s flagship deep-water project



India’s state-owned Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has taken to social media including Twitter to express its thanks to the Indian Navy for getting operations back on track at its Cluster 2 development on Block KG-DWN 98/2 off India’s east coast.

Operations at the operator’s first domestic deep-water project had been halted after the floating production, storage and offloading vessel Armada Sterling V became stranded due to large fishing nets getting entangled in its fuel extracting mechanism, the operator said.

ONGC via LinkedIn expressed its “immense gratitude” to the Indian Navy “for extending timely support in restoring the operation of KG-DWN 98/2 project off Kakinada”.

“Timely action by [the] Indian Navy has completely restored operations enabling considerable savings to the exchequer.”

ONGC added that the Indian Navy had responded quickly to the incident with their team of “highly professional” divers successfully clearing the nets despite extremely challenging underwater conditions – on account of which the salvage efforts took nearly a month.

The FPSO is owned by Shapoorji Pallonji Oil & Gas’ 70:30 joint venture with Malaysia’s Bumi Armada. Armada Sterling V is Indian contractor Shapoorji Pallonji’s fourth FPSO and its third such unit for Indian waters.

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The Armada Sterling V in late December was hooked up on ONGC’s Cluster 2 asset and had been expected to start up in the first quarter this year. It is not known whether any hydrocarbons were produced before the above incident. The FPSO has processing capacity of about 60,000 barrels per day of liquids and 3 million cubic metres per day of gas.

ONGC is investing more than $5 billion on developing the Cluster 2 region of the flagship deep-water Block KG-DWN 98/2 asset, which is expected to produce up to 16.6 MMcmd of gas and 78,000 bpd of oil.

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