India hungry for foreign oil despite home finds

India’s biggest oil find in decades is now on stream but the country, with its rapidly growing economy, will still be one of the hungriest consumers of foreign crude, analysts say.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh turned on the tap at the weekend to start crude gushing from British exploration company Cairn Energy’s remote oil field in western Rajasthan state.
The field contains some 3.5 billion barrels of oil of which it is technically feasible to recover at least one billion barrels.

Edinburgh-based Cairn expects the discovery, which lifted it from relative obscurity into the FTSE-100 index of Britain’s leading companies, to raise India’s oil output by at least 20 percent based on current production.

The oil fields will cut India’s oil import bill by seven percent or 6.8 billion dollars.

But the increased production, expected to come fully on stream in 2011, will come nowhere near to plugging the crude supply gap in Asia’s third-largest economy, analysts say.

AFP