The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) recently began conducting subsurface data acquisition through seismic surveys in various districts of Dhalai, Gomati, South Tripura, West Tripura, and North Tripura, where the state-run oil and gas explorer was awarded acreages by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gases.
These surveys are scheduled to run until May of this year, with a resumption in November. According to ONGC sources who did not want to be identified, seismic surveys typically begin in the summer and end with the monsoons.
ONGC began drilling in Tripura in 1962. The national oil and gas explorer was granted acreage in the state’s Central Baramura, Aramura Bulge, Tichna, and Khubal areas.
ONGC intends to conduct seismic surveys in the state in order to identify additional oil and gas bearing zones. Deepak Sareen, Chief General Manager and Head of Geophysical Services at ONGC, wrote to the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC) that the ONGC’s Assam and Assam-Arakan basin geophysical services, based in Jorhat, had awarded contracts for carrying out 2D and 3D seismic surveys to contractors who would conduct the survey in Tripura.
ONGC discovered gas in the Baramura hills of north Tripura in 1986 and has steadily increased exploration activities since then. The agency now supplies gas to various thermal power plants, including NEEPCO, ONGC Tripura Power Company, and others, with a total power generation capacity of 1,500 MW. It had planned to build a Rs 5,000 crore gas-based urea fertiliser plant in the Khubal area of North Tripura district a few years ago, but the project was shelved due to insufficient gas reserves.
