Reliance Shuts Field in Krishna-Godavari Basin

India's Reliance Industries Ltd has shut down an offshore oil and gas field on the eastern coast of India, the company said in a statement on Friday, after seeing a natural decline in output for months.

The closure marks the beginning of the end of the company's first foray into oil and gas exploration and production that started in September 2008 when the field produced first oil.

"Production from the field had been under natural decline and facing continuous challenges due to high water production and sand ingress... and had no remaining reserves," the company statement said.

The MA field, which was primarily an oil-producing field, is among the three oil and gas fields that the company has in the Bay of Bengal's Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin.

The others are the D1 and D3 fields, which are natural gas producing fields. These fields started production in April 2009.

Reliance Industries' turn into oil and gas exploration and production has had lackluster results for the company's owner and India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani. He promised to produce almost 45 percent of India's oil and gas needs by 2010 and save around $20 billion in its import bill.

The output from the fields started declining rapidly after reaching a peak of 30,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil and 60 million cubic meters per day of gas as the company failed to manage the geological complexities of deep water production.

After a hiatus of 10 years, Reliance, along with its partner BP Plc, has once again allocated an investment of $4 billion to develop new projects in the basin which will produce up to 35 million cubic meters per day of gas in phases over 2020 to 2022, the company said in its annual report published in May.

(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)