British oil firm Cairn Energy Plc on Tuesday announced a second significant oil discovery in its Rajasthan block, where it had in January found India's largest field in more than two decades.
Cairn found oil in the N-A-1 well, eight km away from the successful N-B-1 drilled in January, with estimated in-place reserves of 130-470 million barrels and preliminary recoverable reserves of 20-80 million barrels, a company media release said.
The find is smaller than N-B-1, now named Mangala, which is estimated to hold 450-1,100 million barrels of in-place oil reserves and of which 50-200 million barrels were estimated to be recoverable.
The Mangala find can produce an estimated 2.5 million tonnes of crude oil annually from 2007.
India's total crude oil production is about 32 million tonnes.
Cairn Energy announced that a cumulative flow rate of 6,000 barrels of oil per day has been achieved across three selected zones during an open hole drill stem test programme in the N-B-1 exploration well.
The well intersected a stacked sequence of twelve oil bearing reservoir units in the Fatehgarh formation. Three separate sand units were tested with flow rates between 2,837 barrels of oil per day to 1,240 barrels of oil per day.
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