New Delhi, March 23 The quantity of crude oil currently stocked as part of India’s strategic reserves is around 3.372 million metric tonnes (MMT), which is 64 per cent of the total storage capacity of these reserves, the Parliament was informed on Monday.
The government, through a Special Purpose Vehicle called the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserve Limited (ISPRL), has established Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) facilities with total capacity of 5.33 million metric tonnes (MMT) of crude oil at three locations in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka which can act as buffer for short-term supply shocks, Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Suresh Gopi said in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha.
The exact quantity of crude oil available in these caverns along the coast varies depending on market conditions. The actual reserve is a dynamic number depending on the stocks and actual consumption, both of which are not static. Currently, ISPRL has around 3.372 MMT of crude stock available which is around 64 per cent of the total storage capacity, the minister said.
In July 2021, the government had also approved the establishment of two additional commercial-cum strategic petroleum reserve facilities with a total storage capacity of 6.5 MMT in Odisha and Karnataka, he added.
The minister further stated that to ensure security of crude supplies and to mitigate the risk of dependence on crude oil from a single region, oil and gas public sector enterprises (PSEs), which are board-run entities, source crude oil from diverse sources depending on their technical and commercial considerations. Currently, these PSEs import crude oil from 41 countries, including new suppliers like the USA, Nigeria, Angola, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, in addition to traditional suppliers in the Middle East such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar.
India has diversified its oil and gas imports from sources other than the Middle East following the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas exports transit. As much as 70 per cent of the country’s oil imports are now coming from countries outside the Gulf.
--IANS
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