ONGC to invest $5 b in KG basin

New delhi: Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) plans to invest over $5 billion to produce 25 million standard cubic meters per day (mscmd) of gas from its eastern offshore Krishna Godavari fields by 2013.

The State-run firm on Wednesday submitted to the regulator Director-General of Hydrocarbons an appraisal programme of the discoveries it had made in KG offshore basin, putting the in-place reserves at 6.37 trillion cubic feet, industry sources said.

Besides natural gas, ONGC also plans to produce 8,000 barrels of oil per day from the fields. The reserve estimates and production plan in ONGC's appraisal programme, however, do not include its ultra-deepwater UD-1 discovery in KG-DWN-98/2 block adjacent to Reliance Industries' prolific gas discovery block KG-D6.

ONGC estimates another 2-14 tcf of reserves in the UD-1 discovery, sources said, adding half-a-dozen other finds in the same KG-DWN-98/2 block have been clubbed with other discoveries in the region like G-29, GS-4 and Vashistha.