Oil exploration and production company, Oil India Ltd (OIL), has said it discovered natural gas reserves off the Andaman Islands, the first find in the region.
The "occurrence of natural gas", OIL said in a statement, was reported in the second exploratory well Vijayapuram-2 drilled in the Offshore Andaman Block AN-OSHP-2018/1, which the company had won under the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP), although it did not specify an estimate of the size of the find.
"The preliminary analysis of gas samples, collected during intermittent inflow of gas as part of initial production testing, has confirmed the presence of natural gas. Further gas isotope studies are being undertaken so as to understand the genesis of the gas," the statement said.
Earlier this year in March, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) had begun drilling an ultra-deepwater well ANE-E in the Andaman offshore, although the results of the drilling have not been indicated yet.
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Both OIL and ONGC have been seeking hydrocarbon reserves in the Andaman Sea in the hope of finding additional reserves that could reduce India's 88 per cent dependence on imports for its oil needs, and cut down 50 per cent reliance on overseas for gas requirements.
"As per preliminary assessment, this could be a leading indicator of the presence of source or migration pathway or accumulation of hydrocarbon, which will help in future exploration and drilling strategy," OIL confirmed, and said that the public sector undertaking is also “undertaking additional testing of higher-up prospects to further evaluate the reported occurrence of gas”.
While the company did not give further details, Union Oil Minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, said in a post on X that the discovery, the first reported occurrence of hydrocarbons during the ongoing exploration campaign in the Andaman Shallow Offshore Block, was made in the well drilled at a distance of 9.20 nautical miles (17 km) from the shoreline on the east coast of the Andaman Islands at a water depth of 295 metres and target depth of 2,650 metres.
Having long touted Andaman as holding a Guyana-scale oil field, Puri said the gas samples, brought by ship to Kakinada, were tested and found to be 87 per cent methane.
"Initial production testing of the well in the range of 2,212-2,250 metres has established the presence of natural gas with intermittent flaring,” he shared, adding, “The size of the gas pool and commercial viability of the discovery will get verified in the coming months, but establishing the presence of hydrocarbons in the Andaman basin is a major step in confirming our long held belief that Andaman basin is rich in natural gas, in line with discoveries in the entire area from Myanmar in North to Indonesia in the south in this belt.”
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