Exxon-mobil and ESA --the main explorers-- are hoping for about 3-8 Trillion Cubic Feet of gas. As a comparison the latest patch in Iran is 66 TCF. 3-8 is nothing to scoff on but it is not a game changer as Pakistani will like you to believe.
Pardon me Sir, but I will scoff at that. I come from a state where we have nothing much of value but Natural gas, so it is kind of personal I guess. We, the people, were sold dreams of how a better future awaits us after discovery of a huge gas reserve in the Assam-Arakan basin in Tripura. This is circa early 2000s. There are no official dates as to when exactly gas production began but it had to be before 2009. Aprox. 5.5 MMSCMD was said to be needed by the OTPC project to run. EPC contract of about Rs. 2200 crores has already been awarded to BHEL on 11 August 2008. I know the machines(turbines and stuff) arrived in 2008 itself, I personally saw them being transported. It would be safe to say that we've been producing at least that amount of gas from 2009. Project was officially commissioned in 2013, but the plant has been running long before that. When you do some "back of the envelope" calculations this is what you get.
At least 5.5 MMSCMD for the last ten years. So that's [ 10*365*5.5] million meter cube = 20075 million meter cube = over 20 billion meter cube
And this is just from one well, supplying to one power plant. We have more than 116 functional wells since early 2000s and about 76 of them are producing 4.3-4.5 MMSCMD. Importantly, the success ratio of gas discovery is 1:2 in the state against the world success ratio of 1:5. Many ONGC officials went on record stating that the present production capacity barely scratches the surface of what is actually recoverable. ONGC wants to double gas production by 2022. Private players like Vedanta are entering the scene. We are currently exporting gas to all the "seven sisters" plus Sikkim and to WB in small quantities. We are also exporting electricity from that OTPC plant to all of Northeast and Bangladesh. Suffice it to say, we have Natural gas, loads of it. Pretty rosy picture right, well here comes the not-so-rosy part.
Every industry needs support infra to go with it. Gas needs pipes to be transported and those pipes need money to be built and maintained. And like every other bunch of self-respecting people, we thought we could sell some stuff we produce, make some money and build the infra that we need. Except it didn't really work out that smoothly, its a long story but now you have the state govt. running to the central govt. for money every other day. Its f**k**g embarrassing.
We don't have the crime rates in our state that Pakistan has, we don't have the violence or the extremism(when was the last time you heard of a terrorist attack in Tripura ?). We don't have the over-population, or the "large territory governance problems". With all the positives you'd think we would be the "Arabs of the sub-continent minus the sharia", at least that's the dream our politicians sold us. And yet here we are.
That is precisely the dreams the IK govt. is selling. They have more problems at hand than what they are accounting for. Who knows maybe it will work, but until it does I will scoff and scoff loudly.
Mods I am sorry for going OT, but I felt like I had to say that. Please do move it to a relevant thread.
. After seeing Pakistani optimism, couldn't help but co-relate with that.
