Indian refiners will continue to get oil from Russia at a lower price, so reduction in crude oil production by the OPEC+ group will not affect India. The officials said these things on Tuesday.
He said Indian refiners have been assured of uninterrupted supply of crude oil at current rates. Several reports suggest a change in India’s buying pattern after the global price cap, said a senior official. But Indian refiners will continue to get the benefit of favorable purchase agreements.
Economists have been calling OPEC, an inter-governmental organization of 13 important oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Venezuela, etc. as a cartel. Member countries account for about 44 per cent of the total global oil production, while their share of the world’s oil reserves is 81.5 per cent. These figures are from 2018.
Russia remained the largest source of crude oil for India for the sixth consecutive month in March, supplying 35 per cent of all oil imports. The information comes from Vortexa, a London-based commodity data analyst that tracks ship movements to estimate oil imports.
India imported the highest ever 1.64 million barrels per day of oil from Russia in March, which was 1.6 million barrels per day in February. Imports were 1.4 million barrels in January and 1 million barrels in December. This information was obtained from the data of Vortex.
However, imports from Russia have increased gradually in recent months. Industry officials said this is because of the difficulty faced by Indian refiners to pay in currencies other than the dollar, which was demanded by Russia when it was hit with international sanctions.
An official of the oil marketing company said, now these issues have been resolved and the rupee is trading. This could result in further increase in volumes from Russia. Russian banks are worried about huge rupee reserves with them as imports from India to Russia are much lower than imports from India to Russia.
