India’s ONGC expects Sakhalin-1 to resume production in Oct

NEW DELHI, Aug 17 (PRIME) -- Indian state company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGÑ) expects a gradual restart of production at Russia’s Sakhalin-1 to begin in October, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

A subsidiary of U.S. company ExxonMobil is the project’s operator with a 30% stake, Russian oil major Rosneft has 20%, Japan’s Sodeco has 30%, and India’s ONGC has 20%. ExxonMobil said in March it will leave the project and announced a force majeure event in April, which almost stopped production at Sakhalin-1. In August, the company said that was working on a transfer of its stake in the project to another company.

“Taking into account the current geopolitical situation, in addition to ExxonMobil’s announcement about suspension of operations at the Sakhalin-1 project, the consortium is moving on for a switch of the operator’s powers,” the company said.

“A temporary impossibility to insure … carriers with crude that the project hired to deliver oil to the international buyers has created logistics restrictions for withdrawal of products starting from May 22, which led to a contraction of production in the project’s framework.

“Production was restricted at below installed capacity, it is expected to recover gradually starting from October 2022.”

Other joint ventures of ONGC in Russia – Vankorneft and Imperial Energy – continue their operations, the company added.

Sakhalin-1 develops the Chaivo, Odoptu and Arkutun-Dagi fields on the Sakhalin Island’s shelf with the total estimated resources standing at 307 million tonnes of oil and 485 billion cubic meters of gas.

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