ONGC accuses DGH of not doing its duty

ONGC has charged upstream body DGH with not discharging its contractual and statutory duty and obligation properly that resulted in a controversy over migration of its gas to neighbouring block of Reliance Industries.

In its submission to the one-man A P Shah Committee looking into the gas dispute, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) said the Directorate General of Hydrocarbon (DGH) had “full knowledge of the additional data acquired by RIL and should have discharged its duty without waiting for ONGC to complain”.

RIL had in 2001 and again in 2007 acquired seismic data to study hydrocarbon reservoir lying several hundred metres below the sea-bed not just in its Bay of Bengal KG-D6 block but also of neighbouring blocks of ONGC without the knowledge of the state-owned firm, it alleged. The data acquired by RIL established that Dhirubhai-1 and 3 (D1&D3) gas fields in its KG-D6 block have a considerable extension into ONGC’s adjoining blocks KG-DWN-98/2 (KG-D5) and Godavari PML, the state-owned firm said in its submission.

“DGH did not discharge its contractual and statutory duty and obligations properly,” it said. As a nodal agency for monitoring exploration blocks, DGH was “in a position to find out the extension of the gas field when RIL submitted its initial development plan (IDP) for developing D1D3 discoveries in 2004”.

ONGC said when the IDP was submitted by RIL to DGH in 2004, “it must have given entire data revealing continuity of reservoirs across the block boundaries”. Staffed with expert petroleum professionals with vast experience in interpretation and analysis of geo-scientific data, “DGH should have been able to decipher from the IDP that the reservoirs are continuous and extend into ONGC blocks”.