Consider the variables in India’s energy equations.
India imports 85% of the oil its economy needs. It had planned to reduce that to 67% by next year, but that looks quite impossible today. Especially when India’s demand for oil is expected to grow 5.1% on average every year compared to a global average of just 0.9%.
It doesn’t help that India doesn’t have all that much oil to produce. Even then, in 2019 ONGC, the state-owned oil and gas producer that’s also the country’s largest, said that it planned to double its oil and gas production both in India and its overseas fields by 2040. This was a bold claim from a company whose oil production had already been on the decline for six years.
ONGC also wants to increase its renewables capacity from 0.3 GW to 10 GW. Thankfully, only by 2040.
Meanwhile, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL), also both state-owned oil companies, want to set up 10,000 and 7,000 EV charging stations, respectively, in the medium term. They currently have just 450 and 30 charging stations, respectively.
Among all of these grandiose plans which can’t be cheap, there’s also the fact that state-run oil and gas companies are the largest source of dividends for the Indian government. In the year ended March 2019, they accounted for 40% of the Rs 36,700 crore ($4.9 billion) dividend payout to the government by state-owned enterprises.
You see where I’m going with this, right? The equation doesn’t add up. Limitless ambition, meagre resources, patchy execution, and boundless dividends quite simply don’t square up. So what are the other options to be balance?