Rupganj gas field Sight set on more Purbachal land

The government may have to acquire around one and a half acres of additional land inside the Purbachal New Town residential project of Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakhha (Rajuk) to develop the newly-discovered gas field in Rupganj under Narayanganj district, a top official has said.
About 15-18 more acres of land would be required outside the Purbachal project area to facilitate natural gas supply to the end-users.
"The additional land of around 1.5 acres would be required to carry out further drilling of wells in the Rupganj field," Managing Director of the state-owned Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration and Production Company Ltd (Bapex) Md Abdul Baqi told the FE.
The government already allocated three acres of land inside the Purbachal project at Sector-20 to carry out drilling in the hydrocarbon field, he said.
The area would not be sufficient to continue natural gas extraction as Bapex planned to carry out several more wells in the field, said Mr Baqi.
The extracted natural gas would be processed about five to six kilometres off the well site, preferably near the already-existing natural gas line of Kamta gas field, drilling chief of Bapex Mohammad Shahabuddin said.
Bapex Saturday discovered a 'small' but commercially viable natural gas reserve at Rupganj, about 20 kilometres off the capital.
The field is located near the Kamta gas field, in Kaliganj upazila under Gazipur district.
The Kamta gas field was discovered by the state-owned Petrobangla in 1982 with the total recoverable gas reserves of 50 billion cubic feet (Bcf), the similar quantity of reserve assessed in the Rupganj field.
Commercial gas production from this field was started in 1984. The average gas production was 20 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd).
Gas supply from Kamta later declined to 3.0 mmcfd in 1988 before suspension of production of gas from the field in 1991.