Indian companies have signed contracts worth Rs 3,000 crore in Iraq and the government had been facilitating these contracts with the help of the Permanent Mission of India (PMI) in New York.

The PMI had been facilitating the execution of contracts earlier entered into through the Office of the Iraq Programme (OIP) with the Indian exporters, an official release in New Delhi said on Wednesday.

There was a potential to further tap the contracts worth Rs 2,000 crore in Iraq, it said.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, May 08, 2003

NEW DELHI: State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has found some 600-700 billion cubic feet (BCF) of natural gas reserves in Rajasthan's Chinnewala Tibba, bordering Pakistan, company sources said.

Testing indicates presence of sweet gas with more than 7,000 kilo-calories per cubic metre calorific value, against the usual range of 1,250 to 3,100 kilo-calories per cubic metre in other gas finds in Rajasthan.

''The one well we have drilled so far has flowed 3.5 million standard cubic metres per day of gas. We are delineating the area and another well would be drilled this year to establish the exact recoverable reserves,'' they said.

Earlier, it had made Saraswati and Guda discoveries in the same block with in-place reserves of about 25 million barrels per day. Besides the Rajasthan discovery, ONGC in recent times has made six discoveries, at Vasai West (oil and gas) in Western Offshore, GS-49 (gas) and GS-KW (oil and gas) in Krishna Godavari offshore, Laipling-gaon (oil and gas) and Banamali (oil), in Assam.

The discoveries at Vasai West and Laipling-gaon are particularly interesting; even by preliminary estimates, 240 million barrels of in-place oil plus oil-equivalent gas are available at Vasai West, and 100 million barrels, at Laipling-gaon.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.com, May 03, 2003