India's oil import dependence jumps to 84%

At the 'Urja Sangam' conference in March 2015, the Prime Minister had said that India needs to bring down its oil import dependence from 77 per cent in 2013-14 to 67 per cent by 2022 when India will celebrate its 75th year of independence.

New Delhi:Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have set a target to cut India's oil import dependence by 10 per cent but the country's reliance on foreign oil for meeting its energy needs has jumped to a multi-year high of nearly 84 per cent, latest government data showed.

Speaking at the 'Urja Sangam' conference in March 2015, the Prime Minister had said that India needs to bring down its oil import dependence from 77 per cent in 2013-14 to 67 per cent by 2022 when India will celebrate its 75th year of independence.

Further, the dependence can be cut to half by 2030, he had said.

But with consumption growing at a brisk pace and domestic output remaining stagnant, India's oil import dependence has risen from 82.9 per cent in 2017-18 to 83.7 per cent in 2018-19, according to the oil ministry's Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC).

Import dependence in 2015-16 was 80.6 per cent, which rose to 81.7 per cent in the following year, PPAC said.

The country's oil consumption grew from 184.7 million tonnes in 2015-16 to 194.6 million tonnes in the following year and 206.2 million tonnes in the year thereafter. In 2018-19, demand grew by 2.6 per cent to 211.6 million tonnes.

In contrast, domestic output continues to fall. India's crude oil output fell from 36.9 million tonnes in 2015-16 to 36 million tonnes in 2016-17.

The trend of negative growth continues in the following years as well as output fell to 35.7 million tonnes in 2017-18 and to 34.2 million tonnes in the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2019, PPAC data showed.

The government is focusing on measures like increasing domestic production, promoting the use of biofuel and energy conservation to reduce dependence on imported crude oil.

It changed exploration rules multiple times during the last five years to get the elusive private and foreign investment.

The previous New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) was changed to Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) promising pricing and marketing freedom.

HELP brought in open acreage licensing policy that gave companies the freedom to choose areas they want to explore.

Discovered oil and gas fields, taken away from state-owned firms, were also auctioned but neither this nor the open acreage policy managed to get big names to invest in exploration and production of oil and gas.

According to PPAC, India spent USD 111.9 billion on oil imports in 2018-19, up from USD 87.8 billion in the previous fiscal year. The import bill was USD 64 billion in 2015-16.

For the current fiscal, it projected crude oil imports to rise to 233 million tonnes and foreign exchange spending on it to marginally increase to USD 112.7 billion.

State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp's (ONGC) output fell to 19.6 million tonnes in 2018-19 from 20.8 million tonnes in the previous year. ONGC's oil production was 20.9 million tonnes in 2016-17 and 21.1 million tonnes in 2015-16.

The output from fields operated by private firms has dropped from 11.2 million tonnes in 2015-16 to 9.6 million tonnes in 2018-19.