Himalayan News Service

Digboi, May 6:

Hundreds of aging crude oil wells in India’s northeast could once again come to life, with two of the country’s premier companies launching a massive drive to revive the shut-in oilfields.

Assam state produces five million tonnes of crude annually, with production by state-owned Oil India Ltd (OIL) remaining stagnant at about 3.2 million tonnes for the past one decade.

The Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) is the other firm producing crude in Assam.

“There are serious attempts being made to recover oil from old wells by using sophisticated technologies,” Jyanjit Kumar Talukdar, the group general manager of OIL said. There are more than 1,000 wells in Assam that have stopped producing oil for more than a decade now, prompting experts to look for secondary recovery methods.

“We are using various methods like gas injection and water injection, besides infill drilling of old areas to recover leftover oil,” Talukdar said.

Foreign experts working in the area say the prospects of reviving the old wells look bright although that would require latest technologies and sophisticated equipment.

“Secondary recovery from old wells is very much possible and to achieve that, India need to go for newer technologies,” said Alistair R A Simpson, a British petroleum expert. Simpson is currently supervising a private Indian drilling company engaged by OIL to strike oil near Digboi, 550 km east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati. Digboi today boasts of the world’s oldest operating oil refinery.

“I would suggest using the Canadian system of Electronic Reservoir Stimulation using radio waves to excite the flow of oil in some old wells,” Simpson said. Oil experts in the region have begun exploration in new areas as the old oil fields have been showing “declining trends” with the passage of time.

“We are moving into newer areas and other logistically difficult terrain looking for oil and the prospects look very bright,” Talukdar said.