Reliance Industries Ltd.’s brand-new floating manufacturing system collided lightly with a barge off the east coast, but no one was hurt, and project work was unaffected, the company stated on Sunday.
The Ruby floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel collided with an accommodating barge and sustained minor damage while en route to the deep-water MJ gas condensate development in the KG-D6 area of the Bay of Bengal.”Due to rough weather, the gangway from the accommodation barge Nor Goliath got lifted and made contact with the staircase on the FPSO causing minor damage to the stairs,” a company spokesperson said.
Promptly, Nor Goliath, the spokesperson said, pulled away along with the gangway. The gangway was secured back on Nor Goliath and inspected.”Further, there was no personnel injury and there is no impact on the overall project schedule and commissioning,” the spokesperson added.
A massive vessel called an FPSO is equipped with not only machinery to help produce oil and gas from beneath the sea, but also living accommodations and workstations. A gangway is a raised walkway or platform that serves as a corridor.
MJ is the third and last of a set of discoveries that Reliance and its partner BP are developing in the eastern offshore block. The two will deploy a floating production system in the Bay of Bengal’s high seas to put the KG-D6 block’s deepest gas discovery into production.
Samsung Heavy Industries, a South Korean company, won the contract for the engineering, procurement, building, and installation of the FPSO vessel Ruby in 2019. The double-hulled vessel has a crude production capacity of 60,000 barrels per day and about 12.7 million cubic meters per day of gas.
It sailed from South Korea a few weeks back and was at the anchorage at Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, when its stern hit and damaged Nor Goliath’s gangway.
Ruby suffered minor damages but Nor Goliath’s gangway was damaged. The Gangway will have to be repaired.The MJ field, which is located in the KG-D6 block, is expected to be operational by the end of this year, increasing the block’s “output to over 30% of India’s gas production,” according to Reliance Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani.R-Cluster, Satellite Cluster, and MJ, three distinct development projects in the KG-D6 block that combined are estimated to generate over 30 million standard cubic metres of natural gas per day by 2023, are being funded by the two partners for a total of about USD 5 billion.R-Cluster started production in December 2020 and the Satellite Cluster came onstream in April last year. MJ is expected to come on stream before the end of the year. While the R-Cluster has a plateau gas production of about 12.9 mmscmd, the Satellite Cluster will have a peak output of 6 mmscmd.
Combined gas output from R-Cluster and Satellite Cluster stood at more than 19 MMcmd during April-June, according to Reliance.Reliance has so far made 19 gas discoveries in the KG-D6 block. Of these, D-1 and D-3 — the largest two — were brought into production in April 2009, and MA, the only oilfield in the block, was put into production in September 2008.While the MA field stopped producing in 2019, the output from D-1 and D-3 ceased in February 2020. Other discoveries have either been surrendered or taken away by the government for not meeting timelines for beginning production.
MJ’s reservoirs are about 2,000 metres below the D1-D3 gas fields.
Reliance holds a 66.67 per cent operating interest in KG-D6, with BP holding the remaining 33.33 per cent.