‘British Gas is bullish about India’s exploration and production story’

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: Recent oil and gas discoveries in India are fast catching the attention of leading global energy players. While some of the big players, like Petrobras and Shell, have already joined the race to discover hydrocarbon reserves here, others are seriously considering making big investments in India. British Gas (BG) is one of the few global energy players who came to India in 1994, much before the country began being perceived as a potential destination for large oil and gas discoveries. Jorn Berget is the executive vice-president of BG for the Middle East region, besides India and China. He also heads BG Advance, the technology arm of the Group. In an exclusive interview to Anupama Airy at the company headquarters in Heading (UK), Norwegian Berget, a petroleum engineer, shared details of his Group’s plans and business strategy for India. Excerpts:

With a huge presence across 25 countries, where does India fit into your group’s overall business strategy?

India is clearly a core country for the BG group. We started with our operations in the Panna-Mukta and Tapti (PMT) oil and gas fields with ONGC and Reliance and today, we also have two downstream companies for gas distribution. We do have aspirations to grow our business further.

Given the huge demand for natural gas in India and with the eastern coast clearly emerging as the most successful region with huge gas discoveries, BG sees this as a key growth area for the upstream sector and also in providing gas supply to the country. Through our technical capabilities and skills in deep water and developing difficult fields around the world, BG has very aggressive plans to improve the output from the PMT fields in India through a number of projects that we hope to undertake next year.

Could you specifically talk about your business plans for India?

BG plans to invest $1 billion over the period 2007-2012 in India’s energy sector. We would like to add more hydrocarbon reserves to what we have at present. A higher share of upstream reserves will then help us run our downstream businesses of supplying gas to households, besides commercial and industrial consumers. We would like to even get into infrastructure in the future by laying pipelines for transporting gas. Towards this, we are in talks with some of the southern states of India, including Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, for setting up gas distribution systems.