Battling blowout at a natural gas well near its “home” in eastern Assam, Oil India Limited (OIL) has resumed its operations off the Andaman Islands after almost three decades.
OIL, headquartered in Dibrugarh district’s Duliajan, last handled any exploration and production activity off the islands in the Bay of Bengal in the 1980s. The public sector ‘Navaratna’ company resumed its seismic survey in its Andaman offshore blocks on October 8.
Seismic survey usually precedes all oil and gas exploration activity.
Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited, India’s largest exploration company, had drilled six wells off the Andaman shores during the 2013-14 fiscal without commercial success or production.
“After 2014, we are the only company to venture into the Andaman waters for exploration activities. But while ONGC were in deep waters, we are getting into shallow waters with a sophisticated multipurpose data acquisition vessel,” an OIL spokesperson said.
The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had awarded 32 blocks under the Open Acreage Licensing Policy through two rounds of bidding in January and February, 2019. OIL won bids for 12 blocks, including two covering an area of 9,616.7 sq km in shallow waters off the shores of Andaman Islands.
