The country has been facing a severe gas crisis since the last 48 hours as production at Bibiyana Gas Field, the second largest gas field of Bangladesh, has been disrupted from Thursday afternoon.
Although Chevron, operator of the Bibiyana Gas Field, claimed that the gas field was closed for only two hours, a close look at Petrobangla’s data suggests otherwise.
“Chevron’s Bibiyana gas plant had a shutdown at 1:44 am yesterday as a precautionary measure following a false alarm in the smoke detection system. However, operation resumed at the gas plant at 4 am,” said chevron’s spokesperson.
Petrobangla’s production sharing contract (PSC) department could not be contacted to confirm the actual scenario.
Nawshad Islam, managing director of the Titas Gas Transmission and Distribution Company, said that Gazipur, Savar EPZ CNG stations and adjoining areas went out of gas due to the shutdown of the Bibiyana Gas Field. “Bibiyana meets one-third of our requirements and thus we face huge problems whenever it experiences a shutdown. Such shutdowns seriously inconvenience export-oriented ceramic factories. However, the gas plant there has successfully restarted its production,” he added.
It may be mentioned that the compressor of the gas field had failed due to some technical glitch on June 22 last year.
Chevron is now producing gas from 17 wells of the Bibiyana field. At present, it is producing 950 mmcf of gas.
Prime minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the expansion development plan of Bibiyan on November 28.
At that time, experts expressed deep concern over the government’s plan to augment the already massive output of gas from Bibiyana, saying that such a step could result in complete destruction of the gas field and that the development plan entails a “risky gamble” with the nation. They suggested that the government should be more cautious about extracting more gas from this particular field as it is the second largest gas reservoir of the country.
They predicted that the gas field’s production will start falling from 2018-19.
“Our major gas fields are Titas, Bakhrabad and Bibiyana. But the government’s wrong decision nearly destroyed Bakhrabad field a decade ago. Sangu, another important gas field, met the same fate two years ago. Now the same thing is going to happen to Bibiyana Gas Field as well,” they maintained.
The field is currently producing 1,200 million cubic feet (mmcfd) of gas every day, which is already 100 mmcf of “overproduction”. The new expansion plan will also boost the production of 4,000 barrels of condensate.
Petrobangla had earlier certified the gas field to have 7.4 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas in place, of which 4.2 tcf were proven and recoverable. This was bigger than the last assessed figure of Titas, the country’s oldest producing field, whose reserves are currently being reassessed.
According to the production sharing contract (PSC), a company cannot produce more than 7.5 per cent of the proven and probable (P1 plus P2) reserves of gas a year. “Unfortunately, we don’t know the proven and probable gas reserves as we don’t have any data for any of our gas fields,” said a senior Petrobangla official.