NEW DELHI, April 21: ONGC's expensive foray into the country's deep waters have taken yet another soaking, with the corporation being forced to abandon its drilling operations in the Krishna Godavari region. While ONGC's experts had believed that the strength of the current here would be in the region of 2 knots, the actual current turned out to be more than double, at 4.3 knots.As a result of this, ONGC found that it could not anchor its rig, the Sagar Vijay - the upgraded rig can be anchored at currents upto around 2 knots.It has now moved the Sagar Vijay to the Cauvery basin, where it hopes to be able to anchor the ship within a week's time. Unfortunately, ONGC discovered all this after it had moved its rig all the way from the Cochin shipyard. Under the original schedule, which has now gone wrong twice already, ONGC was to begin drilling operations in the Kerala Konkan area as early as January this year.Delays in the Cochin shipyard prevented this as the impending monsoon wouldn't have givenONGC enough time to do its drilling on the west coast. Which is why it then decided to move to the east coast instead. Little did it realise, at this time, that it would be forced to beat a hasty retreat from here.In other words, ONGC has lost close to four months already. Given the high cost of its foreign experts, Sedco Forex of the US, who charge $ 28,000 per day for their expertise - the fees were lower in the early months of December and January - this means that ONGC has shelled out around Rs 10 crore without even one exploratory well anywhere near being drilled.This does not include the opportunity cost in terms of the cost of the rig itself, since this belongs to ONGC. At the current hire charges of around $ 150,000 per day for such floaters, this adds up to Rs 72 crore. According to ONGCs experts, however, they are not to blame for the current fiasco as none of the available data from the coastguard or the naval authorities showed such sharp currents existed in the Krishna Godavari .ONGCofficials claim that cyclone data for the last 50 years showed that the maximum current in the region was 2.7 knots. Other experts, however, feel that ONGC should have sent an advance team of its own to check the area before physically moving the rig.
