India’s Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has fired the starting pistol on an integrated deep-water development project in the prolific Krishna Godavari basin off the country’s east coast.

Multiple people familiar with the development told Upstream that the state-owned company recently initiated a pre-qualification process aimed at shortlisting leading international engineering houses and consultancies to carry out pre-front end engineering and design and FEED studies on the Cluster 1 project in Block KG-DWN-98/2.

ONGC is spending billions of dollars to ramp up oil and gas production from its east coast deep-water assets, which are expected to contribute more than 35 million cubic metres per day of gas and up to 77,000 barrels per day of crude at peak.