Anand Kumar
Production Engineer
ONGC
Anand Kumar is a Production Engineer at ONGC with over five years of offshore oil and gas experience in well services operations across the Western Offshore Basin. He has led multiple offshore workover and completion campaigns, including sidetracks, recompletions, and complex fishing operations, and played a key role in ONGC’s first shallow-water subsea workover, delivering a significant increase in gas production. Anand has also contributed to 11 subsea well completions in collaboration with OEM Cameron, enabling the tie-back development of remote subsea wells.
Recognized internationally as a Young Energy Professional, he received 1st Place – Best Paper Award at the 6th WPC Youth Forum in Saint Petersburg and was selected as a global mentee in the 4th WPC Mentorship Program, guided by Prof. Dr. Anatoly Zolotukhin.
His current technical interests include CCUS and Hydrogen Storage, with a focus on integrating traditional subsurface engineering with emerging low-carbon energy pathways.
Participates in
TECHNICAL PROGRAMME | Energy Technologies
To ensure viable production, tailored completion strategies are essential. Natural hydrogen systems often feature shallow reservoirs (typically <3000 m), low pressures, and non-traditional trapping mechanisms. These factors necessitate specialized casing and cementing designs to prevent leakage and crossflow while minimizing the risk of gas migration during shut-in or low-flow periods. Corrosion-resistant materials must be considered due to hydrogen's propensity to embrittle steel and elastomers, especially under cyclical loading and long-term exposure.
Our proposed approach involves integrating real-time geochemical monitoring, pressure-transient analysis, and low-rate gas flow testing to characterize the productivity of hydrogen-bearing zones. Emphasis is placed on horizontal or multilateral well completions in fractured or fault-controlled systems, using open-hole or slotted-liner completions to maximize exposure to migrating hydrogen. Artificial lift strategies and low-flow metering systems are evaluated for early-life production monitoring, given the anticipated low volume and diffusivity-driven flow regimes of natural hydrogen systems.
Preliminary modeling and field analog studies suggest that managing hydrogen production requires a hybrid design philosophy, drawing from conventional gas and geothermal well practices. Initial outcomes indicate the need for adaptive well control strategies, long-duration flowback to desorb gas from microfractures, and optimized surface separation systems. These insights are critical to derisk early natural hydrogen exploration projects and will inform the development of regulatory and safety protocols as the industry scales.
Co-author/s:
Krishna Raghav Chaturvedi, Senior Research Fellow, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology.
