Oil & Gas Financial Journal

F3: NGHP - EXPEDITION-01 AREAS

Source: USGS, ICICI Securities

0 Miles 621

0 Km 1,000

Konkan Basin

70° E 80° E 90° E

30° N

20° N

10° N
INDIA

Andaman Islands
Mahanadi Basin
K-G Basin

Under this phase, 21 sites were drilled in four areas – the Kerala-Konkan Basin, west coast; the Krishna-Godavari Basin, east coast; the Mahanadi Basin, east coast; and the Andaman Sea (see Figure 3).

The Expedition-02, approved by the Steering Committee in 2015, has been tasked to identify sites which would ideally have ( 1) sand dominated gas hydrates occurrence, ( 2) reasonably compacted sediments and ( 3) occurrence of free gas below the gas hydrate stability zone. Under this expedition, drilling and coring operations were carried out by a state-of-the-art Japanese vessel, called Chikyu, hired for exploring for gas hydrates in the KG basin, which drilled 40 wells.

The Steering Committee has also approved the fund sharing of the expenditure of NGHP Expedition-02. Based on the results of this phase, further surveys and geo-scientific studies will be planned to identify suitable locations for carrying out pilot production testing in NGHP Expedition-03.

Earlier, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), a comprehensive re-search-oriented gas hydrates program was launched emphasizing the scientific and technological development with objectives like, understanding the nature of distribution of gas hydrates in marine sediments; developing techniques for detection and quantification of gas hydrates; identifying promising sites on regional scale and estimating the resource potential and monitoring environmental perturbation during harvesting of gas hydrates. During the previous financial year 2015-16, the Government of India allocated Rs. 1179 crore to the MoES for Oceanography Research and Meteorology, including research on NGH.

CONCLUSION

In his speech at Petrotech-2016, Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again
emphasized the need to increase India’s
domestic oil and gas production and to
reduce import dependence while striving
towards a gas-based economy. The accel-
erated NGH program of India is a step
forward in this direction. As with the tech-
nological developments that helped launch
the shale boom in the US and saw rapid expansion in the span of a single decade, global
NGH research and production could follow suit.
Notably, unlike above the ground complexities of shale production, NGH deposits
have physical properties and reservoir settings that appear conducive to production
using conventional hydrocarbon recovery methods. Thus, production testing of NGH
may lead to direct supply of gas the existing infrastructure in place. However, the evalu-
ation of future NGH will certainly depend on social, economic, environmental, and political
considerations, besides addressing scientific and technical bottlenecks, particularly with
regard to its environmentally safe extraction and transportation to the existing natural
gas infrastructure and markets.

For the immediate future, it is important that the government continues to push harder for NGH research through sufficient funding and active participation of the hydrocarbon industry. Given certain constraints, commercial production is still at least a decade away. This allows India concurrently to augment its other non-conventional energy sources, such as shale gas and coal-bed methane (CBM) in addition to conventional domestic energy sources in its pursuit of energy security goals.