Government attempts to bridge the ever-increasing demand-supply gap of petroleum products by encouraging exploration of alternative sources of energy such as coal-bed methane, shale gas, gas hydrates, ethanol and biodiesel.
This information was given by the Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Panabaka Lakshmi during the CII Conference on Natural Gas recently. The government would intensify exploratory efforts for oil and gas in the Indian sedimentary basins and abroad, she said.
She also informed that the draft policy for shale gas exploration was being discussed by various stakeholders and may be ready within a year, Panabaka Lakshmi added.
Earlier, M Veerappa Moily, the Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, too had said in Mangalore that India “will now be coming out with a shale oil and gas exploration policy,” without specifying a time-frame for the move.
India is already producing coal bed methane on a commercial scale. The country is the fourth largest consumer of primary energy and accounts for nearly 4.6 per cent of worldÂ’s energy consumption after China, the US and the Russian federation.
The consumption of petroleum products was about 148 million tonne, with a dependence on imports of up to 75 per cent during 2011-12. The natural gas sector constitutes 9.8 per cent of primary energy consumption, and is likely to grow to 20 per cent by 2025, according to the hydrocarbon vision roadmap. About 65 per cent of natural gas is consumed by the power and fertiliser sectors.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.