Flooding Disrupts Half of India’s Natural Gas Production; CNG for Autos Threatened

9 August 2006

Click to enlarge.

Times of India. Heavy flooding in Gujarat has disrupted half of India’s production of natural gas for the second day. Power generation in the north of the country and CNG supplies to automobiles in the capital are threatened.

Heavy monsoon rains have forced some 4.5 million from their homes in at least five states and have killed at least 311 people, according to a report from Reuters.

State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp’s (ONGC) South Bassein and B-55 fields in Mumbai offshore remained closed for the second day in running while the ONGC-Reliance-British Gas operated Panna/Mukta and Tapti fields did not produce any gas and were forced to cut oil production by 20,000 barrels per day.

Over 40 million standard cubic meters per day of gas from these fields was fed mainly for power and fertilizer plants and CNG operations in Delhi.

“The situation continues to remain grim. We don’t see operations resuming in the next couple of days,” a company official said.

Major monsoon-driven flooding in Gujarat in 2005 killed 123 people.

Spatial patterns of the changes in summer monsoon rainfall (%) for the period 2071-2100 with reference to the baseline of 1961-1990, under one scenario. Click to enlarge. Source: Defra

UK’s Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) funded a three-year collaborative project with the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) to assess the impacts of climate change on India’s sea level variability, water resources, forests, agriculture, health, energy, industry and transport infrastructure. The project announced its findings in September, 2005.

According to the report, the Regional Climate Models (RCMs) have shown significant improvements over global models in depicting the surface climate over the Indian region, thereby enabling the development of climate change scenarios with substantially more regional detail.

Among the results was the indication under various scenarios of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and sulphate aerosols of a marked increase in both rainfall and temperature over India into the 21st century.

One scenario showed an increase of monsoon rainfall in some areas of Gujarat and neighboring Maharashtra of some 50% by the period from 2071-2100 over baseline levels from 1961-1990.

Resources:

• India-UK collaboration on impacts of climate change in India