Cairn hires two rigs worth $86 mn from Weatherford

New Delhi: To start the process of extracting oil from its discovery in Barmer in Rajasthan, Cairn India has hired two custom-made drilling rigs from Weatherford International for $86 million. Official sources said these rapid rigs have been built by NOV, Houston, Texas, especially for Cairn.

“These rigs are part of the company’s preparation to start extracting its discoveries in Barmer district in Rajasthan in the later half of 2009,” sources said, adding that the first rig has already reached the Haldia port and the second rig is expected to reach Mundra port on Tuesday.

“The rigs are designed to move rapidly from slot to slot on a pad location, also in between the pad locations. Slots are the surface locations from which the wells will be drilled,” sources explained.

These rigs are highly automated and require minimum human intervention. The rigs will be used for development drilling in the Mangala, Bhagyam and Aishwariya fields collectively known as the MBA fields in the Thar Desert’s Barmer Basin, as well as appraising other finds and carrying out exploration in other parts of the country of Cairn.

The overall development of the field involves the construction of a central processing facility at Mangala supplied by group gathering stations, with oil production and water injection wells being drilled from a number of well pads. Mangala is the largest field in Rajasthan.

Production will start first at the Mangala field, the biggest of the MBA fields, with a view to extracting the first barrels of oil in the second half of next year.

At the peak production, the field is expected produce 175,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent, by 2010. The oil production will bring approximately Rs 15,000 crore as royalty over the next five years to the Rajasthan Government.

Discovered in 2004, the oil reserves in Barmer are estimated to be 3.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent, of which one billion is expected to be extractable.