New Delhi: A $780 million crude purchase contract between BPCL and Brazil’s Petrobras, and a preliminary agreement between Oil India, Numaligarh Refinery and France’s TotalEnergies for sourcing liquefied natural gas (LNG), will be among several deals signed at India Energy Week (IEW) next week, oil minister Hardeep Puri said.
Oil markets have remained stable despite global turmoil, Puri said at the IEW curtain-raiser press conference on Friday.
“Global energy markets are undergoing a change. Global energy markets are stable in spite of those changes. There was so much of turmoil. Price didn’t go below 60. It didn’t shoot up,” he said, adding that he did not foresee any shortage of energy.
New supplies, especially from the western hemisphere, are helping keep markets stable, he said. “If more and more energy is coming on the market from Guyana, from Suriname, from Brazil, there is enough supply. Now, if you allow some of that supply to come into global markets, prices will remain stable.”
Pitting oil-consuming countries against producing countries is an “old mindset”, Puri said, arguing that both producers and consumers are in it together. “Both energy producers and energy consumers have a stake in the viability and the strength and predictability of the system.”
IEW is India’s annual flagship energy conference, scheduled to be held from January 27 to 30 in Goa. During the conference, BPCL’s upstream unit Bharat PetroResources Ltd (BPRL) will sign a preliminary pact with Shell for collaboration in exploration and production opportunities across the globe, Puri said.
Numaligarh Refinery (NRL) is expected to sign a preliminary collaboration agreement with France’s TotalEnergies to set up a 200,000-tonne-per-annum sustainable aviation fuel project at Paradip in Odisha.
ONGC also plans to sign two agreements for its shipping venture with Japan’s Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and South Korea’s Samsung Heavy Industries.
IEW is expected to host 17 ministers and deputy ministers from countries including the UAE, Canada, the Netherlands, Oman, Brunei, Myanmar and Tanzania, as well as more than 75,000 delegates, Puri said.
