New Delhi: State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp's (ONGC) plans to restore normal production from the fire-hit Mumbai High North oilfield have been hit by start-up problems.
The floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, Crystal Sea, hired from SeaDrill of Norway, has not been able to start operations for past three months due to a fault in its import riser, a company official said.
ONGC planned to use Crystal Sea as temporary facility at the Mumbai High North field while permanent processing facilities are built to replace the platform destroyed in a fire on July 27, 2005.
The company had contracted the floater for five years at a dayrate of 76,000 dollars starting June.
"The vessel is being repaired and will be at the field by month end," the official said adding ONGC had not paid SeaDrill the dayrate because of the problem and the five-year lease would start once the vessel began operations.
After the FPSO is in place, ONGC hopes to start pumping 260,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the Mumbai High fields by end of October.
Currently, the field was producing about 240,000 bpd.
ONGC had originally planned to charter the FPSO in late January but it was delayed until June.
The official said ONGC hopes to produce 128.3 million barrels in 2007 compared to 120 million barrels in 2006 and 134 million barrels in 2005 the pre-accident year.
"We will be producing 290,000 barrels per day from the Mumbai High field by March 2007," he said.
The FPSO Crystal Sea was built in 1994 and is capable of producing up to 40,000 barrels per day of a wide variety crudes.
The 100-metre long floater can store just 50,000 barrels of oil and is capable of processing a minimum of 10,000 bpd and a maximum 40,000 bpd.
It would flare any produced gas and will be linked to an unmanned wellhead platform.
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