Natural Gas Production, Resources and Consumption to be more Than Oil

India’s current oil production is around 660,000 barrels a day that of gas has touched 676,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. According to the latest figures released by the ministry of petroleum and natural gas show that during the first two months of the current fiscal, domestic crude oil production stood at 40.3 million barrels, with natural gas production only a tad behind at 5.67 billion cubic metre (bcm), translating into around 37.4 million barrels of oil equivalent. In addition, 106 discoveries had been made so far, out of which 43 were oil discovery and 63 gas discoveries.

Current players in natural gas production and discovered resources are Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) at D6 oilfield in Krishna Godavari (KG) basin; Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation in KG basin and Oil Natural Gas Corporation in Mahanadi.

Reliance was currently producing approximately 176,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. Once gas production from the KG D6 reaches the planned production level of about 528,000 barrels a day of oil equivalent — the total gas production in the country would be about 1.5 times domestic oil production. Estimates of the ONGC discovery are not yet known; GSPC would start producing about 38,000-57,000 barrels a day of oil equivalent gas by 2012.

It expected that with increasing natural gas production, consumption may also increase. It also evident from the following cases; fertilizer companies moved from naphtha, a refinery product derived from crude oil, to natural gas, about 140,000 households in Delhi and 390,000 in Mumbai, which use piped gas instead of LPG for cooking, also witnessed the change. Besides, compressed natural gas has substituted diesel and petrol for use in about 430,000 vehicles in both the cities