In an unusual step for India’s Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), the state owned company has taken to social media to thank the Indian Navy for helping out when commissioning operations at its Cluster 2 development offshore the country’s east coast were affected by an encounter with fishing nets.

Commissioning work at ONGC’s first domestic deep-water project was halted when the Armada Sterling V floating production, storage and offloading vessel was affected by entanglement with long nets, according to the social media posts.

ONGC via LinkedIn expressed its “immense gratitude” to the Indian Navy “for extending timely support in restoring operations at the 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.

ONGC subsequently withdrew the social media posts stating that they contained factual errors.

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.

The Armada Sterling V in late December was hooked up on ONGC’s Cluster 2 asset, with commissioning work continuing. First oil has not yet been announced

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.