Wednesday, Oct 27, 2004
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India & World
By Vladimir Radyuhin
MOSCOW, OCT. 26. India is seeking a strategic energy alliance with Russia that would guarantee India's energy security and recast global energy equations. "In the first half century of Indian Independence Russia has guaranteed our territorial integrity, and in the second half century it may be able to guarantee our energy security," the Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, told Indian mediapersons here after talks with top Russian energy officials and oil and gas majors. "What I am talking about [is] the strategic alliance with Russia in energy security, which is becoming for India at least as important as our national security." During his four-day visit to Russia that ended today, Mr. Aiyar discussed proposals that would enable India to get direct access to Russia's booming oil and gas production and to join forces with Russia to form an Asian oil products market. He reached an agreement on using Russian technology for large underground coal gasification (UCG). The technology, developed by Russia's Skochinsky Institute of Mining, will enable India to extract gas from its vast unminable coal reserves, which will compensate for the shortage of natural gas. A final agreement on cooperation in UCG may be signed either before or during the forthcoming visit of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to India in December.
`New dimension'
"I really think this can give an entirely new dimension to our energy security based on our own endowment of natural resources, but with the assistance of Russian technology," he said. Russia's help may enable India to get up to 200 million cubic metres a year out of the 350 mcm that it will require by 2025. Mr. Aiyar said his talks with the Russian Energy Minister, Viktor Khristenko, and the Gazprom natural gas monopoly head, Alexei Miller, showed that the sides saw "eye-to-eye" on global energy issues and prospects for Indo-Russian cooperation in hydrocarbons. They discussed prospects for further collaboration in the Sakhalin-1 oil-and-gas project, new joint energy ventures in Russia, India and Central Asia, Indian involvement in the possible construction of a Sakhalin-Japan gas pipeline and a Russian oil pipeline from Eastern Siberia to Nakhodka. "With pipeline systems becoming more sophisticated, we can for the first time gain direct access to Russian oil and actually pick it up from Nakhodka," Mr. Aiyar said.
Caspian oil
India is also interested in the Caspian oil. Mr. Aiyar offered India's help to build a seabed oil pipeline in the Black Sea parallel to the existing Bluestream gas pipe from Russia to Turkey. The underwater oil pipe would take Caspian oil to the Mediterranean and further on to the Red Sea, where India will pick it up. The ideas that Mr. Aiyar discussed in Moscow are part of his plan to promote a "really effective Asian oil product market," that would unite Russia and West Asian oil suppliers, on one hand, and principal Asian buyers - Japan, China and India, on the other. The proposal will be discussed at a meeting of Asian oil exporters and importers scheduled for January 19, 2005.
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