Vedanta, one of the world’s biggest producers of minerals, said it plans to increase its oil and gas output by around 100,000 barrels per day to 275,000-300,000 barrels per day by March 2020, and expand its Tuticorin copper plant to the world’s largest.
At present, the Tuticorin copper smelter is producing 400,000 tons per year. The capacity will be increasd to 800,000 tons in two years at an additional cost of $576 mln (Rs 3,750 cr).
“Completion of this project will place Tuticorin as one of the world’s largest single-location copper smelting complexes. The project is expected to have an execution timeline of 24 months, with plant commissioning & stabilization in FY 2020,” it said.
OIL AND GAS
With crude oil prices hitting a multi-year high, Vedanta also unveiled its plans to increase the output of its Cairn oil business substantially.
“The Oil & Gas business has commenced its next phase of growth, which will result in an additional production of around 100,000 boepd. We expect to eventually ramp up to c. 275-300 kboepd by FY 2020,” it said.
This will be achieved via three action plans that cost $850 mln (Rs 5,525 cr).
The first will be to employ the same ‘enhanced oil recovery’ techniques that worked well in its ‘Mangala’ oil field in Rajasthan at the adjoining ‘Bhagyam’ and ‘Aishwariya’ fields.
The second would to use fracking technology to get hitherto difficult-to-reach oil and gas at Raageshwari Deep Gas and Aishwariya Barmer Hill formations.
The third and final strategy will simply be to dig more wells around producing wells in Mangala and Cambay.
Doing so increases the rate of production, even though the life of the field goes down.
Finally, it said it will also augment liquid handling capacity at Mangala Processing Terminal by over 30% to handle incremental volumes.