The scheduled oil well drilling at Kailashtila has been deferred by at least three months as the Sylhet Gas Fields Ltd (SGFL) has failed to complete the necessary paperwork, said SGFL officials.
At the time of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurating the project on September 17, drilling was scheduled to begin in December. This has now been pushed back by at least three months.
“We failed to start drilling as the contract signing with Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration and Production Company Ltd (Bapex) was delayed as the paperwork was not done. We hope to start the drilling in March and end in June. Hopefully, we can go for production in August,” Md Tofazzal Hossain, managing director (MD) of SGFL, a Petrobangla subsidiary, told the Dhaka Tribune.
Bapex - Bangladesh’s sole oil and gas exploration firm - will undertake the drilling at Kailashtilla.
Meanwhile, a Malaysian consultancy firm, Oriax, has been appointed to assist Bapex, as it did not have experience in oil production. The estimated cost of the project is around Tk220 crore.
“We have already signed a contract with SGFL for drilling of Kailashtilla well,” the managing director of Bapex, MA Baki, told the Dhaka Tribune.
In May 2012, more than two decades after the discovery of the first two oil fields in Bangladesh, Bapex, a Petrobangla subsidiary, found oil reserves of nearly 137m barrels in Sylhet’s Kailashtilla and Haripur after conducting 3D seismic surveys at the sites.
The surveys estimated 109m barrels of oil reserve at 4,000m depth in Kailashtilla and 28m barrels at 2,600m in Haripur. But, according to Petrobangla, only 55m barrels or 7.50m tonnes can be recovered.
The Kailashtilla and Haripur gas fields are currently under the supervision of SGFL.
In 1986, Petrobangla’s exploration division discovered the Haripur oil fields. It was leased to a foreign company, Scimitar, which managed to extract approximately 68,873 tonnes of oil from 1987 to 1994.
Kailashtilla, one of the oldest gas fields, was discovered in 1962 produces around 80m cubic feet of gas every day from six wells.