India's MJ gas project progressing to schedule
India's Reliance Industries said July 25 that its MJ gas and condensate project in eastern India's deep waters is progressing, with the final subsea installation campaign now due to wrap-up before September end.
In its first quarter results for the 2023 fiscal year, Reliance said the FPSO vessel for gas project, to be delivered by South Korea's Samsung Heavy Industries, should also arrive before October. MJ was originally due to launch mid-2022 but this appears to have been pushed back by a few months, with commissioning now due by December 2022.
Reliance is developing MJ in partnership with UK oil major BP. The FPSO is equipped to process 60,000 barrels of oil/day as well as 12.7mn m3 of gas, and 30,000 b/d of condensate, according to media reports.
The partners have started a drilling campaign to complete MJ's production wells. Reliance expects the wells to be completed before the end of the third quarter of its current financial year, which runs from October to December.
MJ gas field lies in Indian upstream block KG D6 in water depths of 700mn to 1,100mn. It is the third of three gas projects in KG D6's 350bn Indian rupee ($5bn) integrated development programme.
The first two deposits, R-Series and the satellite clusters, received FIDs in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Reliance and BP achieved first gas at R-Series in late 2020, and brought the satellite cluster on stream in April 2021.
KG D6's daily gas output is expected to reach around 1bn ft3/day once MJ launches. The block's three developments have a discovered gas resource potential of around 3 trillion ft3.