Reliance, BP approve MJ development offshore India

India’s Reliance Industries Limited and UK’s BP have sanctioned the development of the MJ deepwater gas condensate field offshore the east coast of India.

MJ is a gas condensate field and is the third field under development as part of the KG D6 integrated development campaign.

The project is in 700-1100 meters water depth, with a well depth of 4200 meters below mean sea-level in a high-temperature and pressure environment.

It comprises of wells connected to a subsea production, with tie-back to a Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel to process and separate liquids, and gas which will be exported to the onshore terminal through one of the existing 24-inch trunk pipelines.

The project is expected to begin production in mid-2022.

Reliance said Wednesday that the MJ project was the third of three new projects in the Block KG D6 integrated development plan and its approval follows sanctions for the development of ‘R-Series’ deep-water gas field in June 2017 and for the Satellites cluster in April 2018.

“Together the three projects are expected to develop a total of about 3 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of discovered gas resources with a total investment of circa INR 35,000 crore (US$5 billion). These projects together, when fully developed, will bring about 1 billion cubic feet a day of new domestic gas onstream, phased over 2020-2022,” Reliance said.

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of RIL, said: “Bringing these three discoveries to production, as promised in 2017, by leveraging the existing infrastructure has been the primary objective of the Reliance-BP Joint Venture.”

Ambani said the gas would satiate the increasing demand for clean fuel in the country, save foreign exchange and reduce dependency on imported gas.

According to Reliance, India today consumes over 5 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas and aspires to double gas consumption by 2022. Gas production from KG D6 integrated development is expected to help reduce India’s import dependence and amount to over 10% of the country’s projected gas demand in 2022.

Bob Dudley, BP Group Chief Executive, welcomed the investment decision: “We are building an important upstream business in India, helping to supply the country’s growing gas market. Working closely with Reliance, we are efficiently developing discovered resources, with focused exploration to give options for the future. This latest investment is a further demonstration of BP’s commitment to India and helps support India in addressing the dual challenge and moving
to a low carbon future.”