Reliance Industries will supply the second consignment of crude oil from its eastern offshore Krishna Godavari basin D6 block to Chennai Petroleum Corp Ltd in January-end or early February instead of this month.
Reliance had contracted to deliver 450,000 barrels of oil from MA-1 field in the predominantly gas-rich block in the Bay of Bengal to CPCL on December 23-24.
However, there was an equipment failure at the field last week forcing an emergency shutdown of the facilities, sources said.
After the shutdown, Reliance offered to sell 300,000 to 320,000 bpd of oil to CPCL and informed the company that if it wanted the full contracted quantity it would have to wait till February for producing the remainder quantity after the field restarts production.
CPCL opted to wait, they said.
The field, which started crude oil production in September, last week suffered an equipment failure leading to closure of the facility for 3-4 weeks.
Sources said crude oil from the MA-1 field is stored on a floating, production, storage and off-loading vessel (FPSO) at the well-head and once critical volumes are reached it is transferred to a ship for transportation to a refinery.
On December 9, a rupture in a short pipe spool connected to the flare header in the FPSO led to the emergency shutdown of the production system.
Reliance had last month sold the first consignment of 59,000 tons of oil from the field to Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltds Vizag refinery in Andhra Pradesh. The oil was sold at $5.34 a barrel discount to Nigerian crude grade Bonny Light.
Oil and Natural Gas Corp, India's largest crude oil producer, also benchmarks its prime Mumbai High crude at this grade.
Both Vizag and Chennai refineries have evinced interest in taking the entire peak output of 40,000 bpd (2 million tons a year) of sweet crude on a long-term basis. The peak output was envisaged in second calendar quarter of 2009 and in all likelihood, Reliance may split the volumes equally between the two, sources said.
Reliance is the operator with a 90 per cent stake in the 7,645 square km D6 block, off the Andhra coast. Niko Resources of Canada holds the remaining 10 per cent interest.
The company, which had budgeted $1.5 billion for developing the oil field, has till now spent $950 million and would invest the remainder in drilling and tying in four additional wells.