Disappointment cast a shadow over state-run Sylhet Gas Fields Limited (SGFL) after a two-year test drilling effort yielded an empty well, crushing the government’s hopes of striking oil.
Well 7 at Kailashtilla Gas Field, hyped as a hydrocarbon godsend, failed to redeem hopes of securing the country’s growing energy needs, said top officials of the Bangladesh Oil, Gas and Mineral Corporation, widely known as Petrobangla.
The media hype in 2012 followed a three-dimensional seismic survey by Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration and Production Company Limited (Bapex), conducted over 190 square kilometres in Kailashtilla which suggested that Well 7 possessed large oil reserves.
Bapex, a subsidiary of Petrobangla, was tasked with drilling the well that was projected at the time to be able to produce 500 barrels of oil and 25 mmcfd gas per day.
The exploration firm dug some 3,504 metres but the analysed data showed no sign of oil in the well, an official of Bapex told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday, asking not to be named.
“The drilling location was a distance of 300 metres from Kailashtilla Well 4. Analysing Well 4 data, they thought that drilling Well 7 would not be fruitful because they are close to each other,” he said.
“We completed 3,501 to 3,504 metres drilling stem test (DST). But there was no oil to be found,” SGFL Managing Director SAF Md Najmul Ahsan Haider told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
“We completed 3,262 to 3,266 metres DST. After analysing the data we will comment,” he said.
SGFL is a Petrobangla company.
“After drilling, no oil was found at Kailashtila 7. It was nothing but waste of money,” Professor Ijaz Hossain of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
An upper zone DST at 3,125 to 3,150 metres, a level where gas might be found, will be done by Bapex, he said.
“Our survey virtually guaranteed the presence of oil in the well, but it seems unlikely to find oil even if we start digging wells,” Md Haronur Rashid Mullah, general manager of SGFL and project director for drilling Kailashtilla Well 7, said.
On October 17, 2014, the drilling of Kailashtilla Well 7 at Sylhet Gas Field in Golapganj upazila of Sylhet began at a cost of Tk220.5cr.
SGFL officials said Well 7 would have been the country’s second oil well after the Haripur well in Sylhet Gas Field in Jaintapur upazila of Sylhet in the 1980s.
Haripur field stopped producing oil in 1994.