Reliance KG-D6 block’s D1/D3 gas field shuts down; check why once India’s biggest gas field closed

D1/D3 gas field, India’s first deepwater gas field, ceased to produce on Monday after a USD 1 billion investment and mammoth technological intervention by Reliance Industries and its partner BP Plc of UK extended the life of dwindling fields by four years, sources said. D1/D3 field, in Block KG D6 (KG-DWN-98/3) located in the Bay of Bengal, was India’s first deepwater gas field to be put on production in April 2009. Output, which peaked at over 61 million standard cubic meters per day in 2010, had been on a decline as sand and water ingress forced wells to shut down one after the other.

While at the peak, it was India’s biggest gas field, in the last quarter D1/D3 produced an average of just 1.5 mmscmd. The sources said only three out of the 18 wells drilled on the fields had remained on production and they too died on Monday. In perhaps one of its kind intervention in a deepsea field, Reliance-BP, through use of a combination of complex techniques, kept the wells flowing at Dhirubhai-1 and 3 (D1&D3) fields for the last four years.