The Ruias-owned Essar Oil has bagged an offshore oil and gas block in Vietnam’s Song Hong basin. The deal was done through Essar Exploration & Production (EEPL), Mauritius.
NEW DELHI: The Ruias-owned Essar Oil has bagged an offshore oil and gas block in Vietnam’s Song Hong basin. The deal was done through Essar Exploration & Production (EEPL), Mauritius.
Essar Oil is in the process of consolidating its upstream exploration and production
activities under its subsidiary EEPL. “This will help build a strong, fully integrated oil company with upstream, refining and downstream marketing activities,” said an official statement.
Spread across approximately 5,925 sq km, the Vietnam block, which is the twelveth for the company, was awarded under a recent licensing round where seven offshore blocks were on offer. It is a shallow water block with average water depth of 60 to 70 metre.
The exploration phase is estimated to last five years and the investment will be approximately $60 million.
The minimum work programme for the block envisages detailed geological and geophysical studies, reprocessing of selected existing 2D seismic data, acquisition, processing and interpretation of fresh 3D seismic of 1,000 sq km, and drilling of two exploratory wells with 3500 m target depth.
Once this exercise is completed, Essar Oil will have eight oil and gas blocks and one coal bed methane block.
Essar’s E&P (exploration and production) portfolio currently comprises 11 onshore and three offshore blocks for oil, gas and CBM in India, Madagascar, Mauritius, Myanmar and Nigeria with total acreage of about 46,000 sq. km. in onshore and 4,600 sq. km. in offshore, held under EEPL.
This includes onshore blocks in Madagascar; an offshore block in Nigeria; on shore block in Mehsana, Gujarat; a coal bed methane block in Raniganj, West Bengal; the offshore field Ratna and R Series and two onshore blocks in Assam.
Meanwhile, Essar Oil’s 210,000 barrels a day refinery in western India is running at full capacity ahead of planned schedule of end-March, its managing director said. “Our refinery is running at full capacity and in between it also ran at a higher rate of 11 million tonnes a year (220,000 bpd),” Naresh Nayyar said.
Essar’s refinery at Vadinar in Gujarat is the second private refinery in India’s state-dominated oil sector.
“Our crude distillation unit of 10.5 million tonnes a year capacity is consistently running at full capacity and some units are operating at even higher level. All these are under stabilisation and we have been running at full capacity,” Nayyar said. He said Essar’s vacuum distillation unit was operating at 120% while the fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) was also running at over 100 percent of nameplate capacity. (With Reuters inputs)
jyoti_m@dnaindia.net
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