Saturday, June 24 2006 12:41 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Guwahati: India plans to dig the bed of the Brahmaputra, one of Asia's biggest and most turbulent rivers, in Assam to hunt for crude oil reserves.

"A Kazakhstan geophysical firm would begin 2D seismic survey by November this year on the Brahmaputra before we begin exploration work to look for oil," Mulkh Raj Pasrija, chairman-cum-managing director of Oil India Limited (OIL), told sources Saturday.

OIL, a premier state-owned oil exploration firm, said the survey was likely to cover an area of about 2,000 sq km.

"This is a proven oil rich zone and we are confident of striking crude along the Brahmaputra," Pasrija said.

"We have launched an aggressive attempt to accelerate oil production in the country with a target to enhance our output in Assam by at least one million tonnes by next year," he said. OIL, with its headquarters in Assam, produces about 3.2 million tonnes of crude in the state annually.

The company has hired several foreign firms to revitalise aging oilfields and carry out exploration works in new areas.

"For the first time in Assam we are using some new techniques like horizontal drilling and J-bend methods to augment oil production. These new techniques are expected to yield at least three times more oil than the conventional vertical drilling system," OIL explorations director S.K. Patra said.

The company also plans to increase natural gas production from 5.7 million cubic metres to seven million cubic metres per day by the end of next year.

Assam has over 1.3 billion tonnes of proven crude reserves and 156 billion cubic metres of natural gas reserves of which an estimated 58 percent of the hydrocarbon reserves are yet to be explored.

"Assam accounts for nearly 50 percent of India's on-shore crude production and has the highest success ratio in the world with 70 percent of the exploration sites yielding oil"," said the OIL chairman. Assam is home to the world's oldest operating oil refinery, the Digboi Refinery, established in 1901.

The 2,906-km-long Brahmaputra traverses Tibet, India and Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

India produces about 30 million tonnes of crude annually, with Assam accounting for about five million tonnes of the total.