Saturday, September 1, 2012

A little oil and a lot of ego – When will our crude import bill drops? The sorry state of India’s Oil and Gas exploration sector


What a country, which depends extremely on foreign sources for her energy needs, will do first? Common sense says that, she will try to come out of the shackles of dependency and try to stand on her own. Situation is not so different for India, who imports 80% of required oil. However the irony is that, we not showing much urgency in developing what so little natural crude/oil deposits we may have.

If you have any more doubts read this report (related to Indian oil minister’s written response in Parliament) on Reuters,

"...Energy firms that have invested more than $12 billion have been hit by delays on required approvals for 52 exploration blocks, some awarded as far back as 1999..."

"Approvals have been delayed due to defence, environment and maritime boundary issues...Of the blocks awaiting approvals, 22 belong to Oil and Natural Gas Corp., 15 to Reliance Industries, five to BHP Billiton, three to Cairn Energy India and two to Australia's Santos Ltd. British firms BG Group, BP and Italy's ENI own one each...."

We don't have any abundance of oil and gas deposits and importing 80% of our oil needs costing our exchequer billions of dollars every year.

If we are allowing this much unreasonable delays in permitting exploration, then I don’t think companies will be interested in investing huge amounts (oil and gas exploration is a very costly affair) in future. After all why should they waste their money? Earlier the government realise this fact the better...

Sajeev.

References


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Photo Courtesy: Wikipedia (Author - Frank van Mierlo)

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