Reliance Industries Ltd has hired Tranocean's Deepwater Frontier, a US firm, for deep-sea drilling rigs to develop gas fields in the prolific KG-D6 block off the east coast.
The company will use Transocean's Discoverer 534 in August 2007 on a 30-month contract at a day rate of $250,000 and a third rig Deepwater Expedition at $375,000 a day for two years from March 2008.
The company has planned to invest $5.2 billion in bringing to production Dhirubhai-1 and Dhirubhai-3 fields in block KG-D6 in Krishna Godavari basin by June 2008.
The company will lay a 1,386 km pipeline from Kakinada of Andhra Pradesh to Bharuch in Gujarat by investing $4 billion for the transportation of fuel. The company expects about 40 million standard cubic meters of gas to be produced per day by June 2008 and thereby raising to 80 mmscmd in five months.
The company has planned to drill 22 development wells to produce gas from the two fields and then pipe it to a gas processing facility at Kakinada and then through a pipeline to Gujarat which will be built by April 2008.
The company has also planned to build a pipeline to Chennai and Bangalore in 2009 and a pipeline from Kakinada to Haldia in West Bengal to transport the fuel. The estimated cost of these routes is $9 billion which is included in the total cost of $600 million.
So far 17 out of the 22 exploratory wells drilled in block KG-D6 (KG-DWN-98/3) have been discovered and oil has been found in two wells in the block.