Gas production from offshore Sangu field was suspended on Tuesday evening after faults were detected in its platform in the Bay of Bengal, dealing the country’s gas production another blow after the suspension of gas extraction from Bangura field on June 7.
Petrobangla chairman Hossain Mansur told New Age on Tuesday evening that gas supply from the Sangu field was suspended following failure of three generators on the offshore platform.
The filed operated by UK-based Cairn Energy produces around 35 million cubic feet per day and it is one of the major gas suppliers in Chittagong.
With the halt in gas production from Sangu, the gas supply capacity of Petrobangla was reduced further as a 120-mmcfd-supply-capacity Bangura field, operated by Irish Tullow Oil has been out of production for the last nine days.
Mansur said that Cairn could not repair the generators on Tuesday because of strong winds blowing over the Bay.
He said that the first of the main generators on the Sangu platform went out of operation on Tuesday morning.
‘Then two other back-up generators also went out of operation. The weather is rough over the Bay. The sea has also risen by two metres hampering efforts to go to the platform to repair the generators,’ he said.
Mansur said that the met office had informed them that the weather was likely to calm on Wednesday morning and hoped Cairn would try to repair the faults by then.
Tullow Oil, meanwhile, could not start gas production from the Bangura gas field till Tuesday although Petrobangla officials had earlier said that it would take two to three days to repair a damage which occurred on June 7 in the transmission line linking the field.
Petrobangla officials said that although the damage was repaired, Tullow could not confirm when they would start production from the field.
Petrobangla supplied around 1970mmcfd of gas before the closure of Bangura and the production came down to 1880mmcfd on Tuesday despite increase in gas production from other fields.
Power generation meanwhile decreased further on Tuesday after the closure of the Sangu field.
The highest power generation was over 4,000MW on Monday but PDB could generate around 3864MW of electricity on Tuesday.