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Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Panchayati Raj today called for opening a new “Silk Route” for supply of oil and gas from the Caspian to oil importing Asian nations like India. Addressing the 12th International Caspian Oil and Gas Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, today, Mr. Aiyar said that the recently commissioned Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline offered the possibility of transporting the rich oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea not only to Europe, as planned, but also to India and to South East Asia. He pointed out that crude oil could be pumped into Israel’s Ashkelon pipeline in the reverse flow from Ashkelon-Eilat pipeline in crude carriers in the Red Sea.
Mr. Aiyar noted that Asian oil consuming countries like China, Japan, South Korea and India were in aggregate the principal consumers of oil produced in West Asia. In the case of India, West Asia provided over two-thirds of India’s crude requirements. Hence, the import of oil through the BTC pipeline offered an important opportunity to diversify sources of supply to India and other Asian countries. In this context, Mr. Aiyar recalled the historical ties between India and Azerbaijan when Baku was an important city on the Silk Route. He said a new relationship between India and Azerbaijan based on energy imports constituted a revival of the oil “Silk Route” and imparted a significant contemporary value to it.
The Petroleum Minister provided his rapt audience with some details of his recent visit to Pakistan where after meetings with Pakistani leaders, a decision had been taken to vigorously pursue the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline as also other pipeline proposals under consideration in Pakistan such as the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline (TAP) and a pipeline from Qatar to Pakistan across the Gulf. The Minister said that the TAP pipeline, which would referred to as TAPI with India’s participation in it, could be expanded with the participation of other Central Asian countries in it such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. He also suggested that Russia would also benefit from its involvement in this project.
Elaborating on the pipeline proposals, the Minister said that these projects are not alternatives in themselves. The aggregate unmet gas demands of India and Pakistan were expected to reach about 500 million tones standard cubic metres per day by 2025 which would make all the proposals under consideration economically viable.
Mr. Aiyar pointed out that these pipelines taken together would constitute an Asian energy grid which would serve the interests of all the countries concerned by complementing “mutual trade with mutual investment”. In this regard, Mr. Aiyar said that India proposed to expand its presence in Azerbaijan in the oil and gas sector by pursuing opportunities in the areas of exploration and production, upgradation of refineries and benefiting from the centres of excellence available in Azerbaijan in the energy sector. He also invited Azeri companies to participate in India’s exploration proposals.
Mr. Aiyar’s presentation evoked deep interest among the senior executives of the world’s major oil and gas companies who were for the first time a powerful message setting out India’s deep interest in participating in the BTC pipeline and inviting Central Asian countries, particularly oil-rich Azerbaijan to participate in pipeline projects that would provide oil and gas to South Asia and South East Asia.
After his strong presentation, the Petroleum Minister also answered a number of questions from the audience seeking further information on how India was pursuing its energy security interests and details of the pipeline proposal. A Pakistani executive in the audience described Mr. Aiyar’s success in achieving agreement on the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline during his recent visit to Islamabad as a mark of “renaissance” in Indo-Pakistan relations.
Rcj/sb/kc-090605/Baku
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