ISLAMABAD: Oil and Gas Development Company (OGDC) is set to begin drilling for shale oil and gas reserves in the Kunnar Pasakhi field in Hyderabad district in December this year, reported The Express Tribune.
“This will be a pilot project to be launched by the country’s largest oil and gas explorer,” an OGDC official said, adding that the company would press on with the project if all environmental and safety standards were met.
OGDC has been part of a consortium that searched for offshore oil and gas reserves in the Arabian Sea. Though the effort failed to yield any result, Pakistan was able to collect data on offshore hydrocarbon deposits in the country.
Domestic natural gas production has been stagnant since the year 2000 and no new big discovery has been made since then. Pakistan has so far been banking on conventional oil and gas drilling but efforts to explore shale oil and gas are expected to give a boost to energy supplies.
According to the latest study mentioned in the report, the shale gas potential in the Indus Basin is 1,000 trillion cubic feet over an area of 110,000 km. Tight gas potential in the Indus Basin is estimated at 400 trillion cubic feet and the best shale gas potential in the lower Indus Basin is estimated at 7.8 trillion cubic feet over an area of 146 km.
According to an official quoted in the report, exploration companies have already found some traces of shale gas during the search for conventional gas reserves as 10% to 12% of shale gas appears to be on upper faces of conventional gas.
