Mumbai–ONGC Videsh Ltd, India’s flagship firm for overseas oil asset acquisition, has hired Singapore-based FACTS to advise it on bringing natural gas produced from Sakhalin-I oil and gas fields in Far East Russia to India in form of liquefied natural gas.
OVL, a subsidiary of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), has told the Sakhalin-I field operator ExxonMobil of US that it is willing to buy the entire LNG produced from the field, a senior company official said.
“We have asked ExxonMobil to re-examine the option of converting the gas produced from Sakhalin-I fields into LNG for exports. This may be done by tying up facilities with Shell’s Sakhalin-II project, which is already building LNG export facilities,” he said.
OVL has engaged the services of Fesharaki and Associates Consultancy and Technical Services (FACTS) to advise it on pursuing the LNG option with the operator.
At an appropriate time, OVL would seek the intervention of the government for impressing the Russian Federation.
ExxonMobil had previously told OVL that the contract for the field provided that gas resources could only be developed by the consortium as a whole and individual stakeholders were not free to takeaway their share, the official said.
[inline:1]The Sakhalin-I fields, where OVL has a 20 percent stake, is expected to produce 250,000 barrels of oil per day from 2007 and 8000 million cubic feet per day of gas from 2010-11.
The project at the beginning of October started producing limited oil and gas.