Which among the following was the first deepwater block in India to start…

Concept. An offshore acreage is classified as a deepwater block purely by the depth of water above it — in Indian practice, roughly 400 metres and more, as against the shallow shelf waters in which the country’s older offshore fields sit. A block is said to have started production only when hydrocarbons first flow from it commercially to shore, which is a much later milestone than discovery: deepwater output first needs subsea wells, flowlines, a control-and-riser platform, a long tie-back and an onshore terminal before a single cubic metre can be sold.

Application. Trace that discovery-to-production chain for India’s eastern offshore:

1. Under the first New Exploration Licensing Policy round the Krishna–Godavari deepwater licence KG-DWN-98/3 — worked under the name block D-6 — was awarded to Reliance Industries.

2. Gas was struck there in 2002 and the pool was named Dhirubhai-1; a second accumulation, Dhirubhai-3, followed in the same block.

3. A subsea development in about 1,000 metres of water in the Bay of Bengal connected the producing wells through flowlines and risers to a control platform, and from there roughly 60 km by pipeline to the Gadimoga onshore terminal in Andhra Pradesh.

4. Commercial gas first flowed on 2 April 2009 and entered the East–West pipeline — the first natural gas India produced from a deepwater block.

Cross-check. Test the claim against the other acreages named, and against what followed:

• NEC-DWN-2002/1 — a Mahanadi acreage off the Odisha coast from the 2002 licensing round — remained at the exploration stage and was relinquished without a development, so it never reached a production start.

• KG-DWN-2005/2, a later Krishna–Godavari acreage, likewise stayed an exploration block and was given up without producing.

• SB-11 belongs to the western (Mumbai) offshore in the Arabian Sea, the shallow-water province of the Bassein and Mumbai High fields, not to India’s deepwater acreage set.

• The next deepwater start in the very same basin — ONGC’s KG-DWN-98/2, the Cluster-2 development — only came on stream in 2023–24, about fifteen years later, which confirms that nothing overtook the 2009 date.

Result. The first deepwater block in India to start natural gas production was Krishna Godavari D-6, the block held under licence KG-DWN-98/3.