First Ship load of Crude Oil reaches India

On April 13, 2020, the first crude oil of 1 million barrels from UAE have reached India. The oil prices have declined by 60% since January, 2020. The prices are expected to rise with OPEC and Russia have come to terms to cut their production by 10%. Hence, this is the right time to fill in oil storages.

India’s oil reserves

India has an emergency storage of 5.33 million tonnes. This would suffice the oil demands of the country for 9.5 days. The oil reserves are stored in Mangalore, PAdur and Vishkhapatnam. The Padur oil storage is the biggest of all the three storages. It can store 17 million barrels (2.5 million tonnes).

Financial requirements

The Government of India had set aside Rs 700 crores for oil alone. It needs Rs 2,000 crore more to buy 15 million barrels.

Oil Imports

India imports 83% of its oil. Iraq is India’s largest crude oil supplier meeting one-fourth of the country’s needs. India imports around 111 million tonnes of oil from Iraq. Following Iraq, Saudi Arabia is the second largest oil supplier exporting 20.7 million tonnes of oil to India.

India-US

The oil imports from the US has been increasing lately. US is the sixth largest oil supplier of India. In 2017, India imported 1.9 million tonnes of crude oil from the US. This increased to 6.2 million tonnes in 2018-19.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2020