India hopes to attract around US$300 billion in investments in its energy sector in the coming decade, including in refineries, natural gas infrastructure and trade, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities, India's Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said at an energy conference in Delhi on Tuesday.
India is looking to boost its natural gas use to cut carbon emissions and is rolling out city gas distribution networks, building several long gas pipelines and a number of LNG terminals, the minister said.
"As a next step, we would soon be setting up a gas trading hub that will allow easy and ready access to gas suppliers and buyers to freely trade natural gas and in turn help India to develop its own hub based pricing," Pradhan told the conference.
India is also aware of its dwindling domestic oil and gas production and has amended its legislation for exploration and production to a revenue-sharing model and is opening its entire sedimentary basin to investors through open acreage licensing, the minister said. The country is also offering fiscal incentives to operators working with advanced technology for enhanced oil and gas recovery, Pradhan added.
India is also the site for Asia's biggest green oil refinery and petrochemical complex, which is being set up in the state of Maharashtra on India's West Coast, at a cost of about US$40 billion by Indian oil marketing companies together with Saudi Aramco and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the minister said.
Related: Will China Turn Its Back On U.S. LNG?
This summer, Saudi Aramco and ADNOC signed a memorandum of understanding with a consortium of Indian national oil companies to jointly develop the 1.2 million bpd integrated mega refinery and petrochemical complex in Maharashtra state. By investing in the Indian mega refinery, the national oil companies of leading OPEC producers Saudi Arabia and the UAE are securing off-take of their crude oil in a strategic fast-growing oil market in Asia.
According to the BP Energy Outlook 2018, India is set to overtake China as the largest growth market for energy by the late 2020s. India's energy consumption is expected to grow by 4.2 percent every year by 2040, faster than all major economies in the world.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More