Russia and India are interested in collaborating on joint energy projects, including oil and gas production in Russia’s Far East and Arctic shelf, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday after meeting with his Indian counterpart in Moscow.
While China is the largest importer of Russian oil, it tends to take deliveries from the nation’s Far East. Yet so far in August, shipments of Urals – which loads from Baltic and Black Sea ports – were almost 75,000 barrels a day. That’s almost double the year-to-date average of about 40,000 barrels, according to Kpler. In contrast, exports to India sunk to no more than 400,000 barrels a day this month, compared with the average of 1.18 million.
India’s domestic oil and gas production is nowhere near enough to meet even half of its demand for oil and gas, but any boost to domestic supply would be welcome as a replacement for import dependence, which currently stands at an impressive 85% of total demand for oil.
The plant’s projected capacity will be enough to meet India’s requirements for blending 1% of sustainable aviation fuel with jet fuel beginning from 2027, the chairman of Indian Oil Corp., Arvinder Singh Sahney, told the media as quoted by The Indian Express. The main market for the product will be Europe, which has SAF blending mandates for airlines operating on its territory.
“India’s energy journey offers engagement opportunities with Indian companies across multiple areas, including joint participation in the upcoming OALP-X bidding round, collaboration on subsea manifold and offshore technology development, apart from deploying AI-driven solutions for digital transformation in upstream operations,” the Indian minister added.
In one of his more controversial decisions last week, President Trump said the U.S. would impose an additional 25% on many Indian imports—because of India’s imports of Russian crude oil. The news lifted oil prices, and Indian refiners suspended their Russian oil orders.
“Adequate inventories and no risk of a coal shortage have helped power plants reduce buying from Coal India,” the former chair of Coal India, Partha Sarathi Bhattacharya, said, as quoted by Reuters. However, “this is transient, and coal buying will increase once power demand starts growing faster,” the former Coal India executive also said.
ADNOC Gas chief executive Fatema Al Nuaimi said, “This long-term agreement with HPCL, our third with Indian companies in the past year, reflects the robust energy partnership between the UAE and India. This milestone underscores ADNOC Gas’ ability to reliably meet rising global demand for LNG and support India’s ambition to increase natural gas to 15 percent of its primary energy mix by 2030”.
Things are going to change for Nayara Energy, a large Indian refiner, in which Russia’s Rosneft has a sizable stake. Nayara Energy was named specifically among entities to be sanctioned by the EU. The Indian company condemned the sanctions as “unjust and unilateral”, echoing New Delhi’s official response to the sanction package, which said the Indian government did not support that package.
Freight rates for Russian Urals crude from Baltic ports to India have dipped again in July, falling to $5.0–$5.3 million per Aframax shipment—down from $5.5–$5.7 million in June—as more tankers become available.