India’s Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri attended the opening ceremony of ADIPEC 2022, as part of the Ministerial Panel discussion.
HE Puri was part of a 15-min panel discussion, which was attended by HE Suhail Mohamed Faraj Al Mazrouei, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure for the UAE and HE Tarek El Molla, the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for Egypt, and moderated by John Defterios, the former CNN emerging markets editor.
At the panel discussion, HE Puri said: “There is pressure on the economy, because the scale at which we are working – is to supply the energy needs of 1.4 billion people and even though we have not had situations where petrol, diesel, or gas has not been available, there is a cost attached to it.
“All policy decision have consequences – intended and unintended. One of the unintended consequence is that when prices increased (on the one hand there is inflation and movement towards global recessionary conditions); however, in India, it has also galvanised the movement in the other direction – for instance, there is billions of dollars coming in to explore at the ecosystem for electric vehicles.
“We have done the transition on bio-fuels – from 1.4% we have reached 10% blending, and we are going to 20% blending in the next two years – bringing the target of 2030 down. We are going in a big way on compressed biogas.
“Most importantly, we have opened up a total of 3.5 million sqkm. of sedimentary basin – we have opened it out to international investment so all the major oil entities – some of them have very advanced arrangements with our companies, others are coming in, because in order to make that transition, whatever your transition date is, you have to survive the present.
“The survival of the present cannot be on terms of entire economies – there are countries around the world where for the love of money, you cannot access energy, so i’m not going into the causation into why it happened. What i think is the transition itself would be severely undermined if the current ability of especially large consuming countries is not cushioned to make that transition.
“In India, we feel very confident of being able to make it…, but high energy prices without any doubt have consequence which we need to factor in and one of the unintended cause is that many of us are now going to diversify, we are going to look at alternate energy sources faster than we had originally envisioned.”
According to a statement from India’s Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, the Minister is expected to have bilateral discussions with his counterparts from UAE, Suhail Mohamed Faraj Al Mazrouei, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, and Sultan Ahmad Al Jaber to strengthen energy cooperation within the overall framework of India-UAE Strategic Partnership.
He will also have meetings with his counterparts from various countries and heads of international energy organisations and CEOs of global oil & gas companies, who are attending the ADIPEC 2022.
The Petroleum Minister also inaugurated the Indian Pavilion at ADIPEC, which was jointly set up by the Federation of Indian Petroleum Industry (FIPI) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
