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: Burying fossil fuels, sowing renewables
In the next 300 years, mankind will have used up the world’s fossil fuel resources that took 600 million years to be created. With one-fifth of the world’s population, India ranks sixth in terms of energy demand, accounting for 3.61% of the global energy needs, and together with China is the fastest-growing user of fossil fuels.
With over 40% of the country’s people, mostly in the rural areas, deprived of electricity and oil prices hitting an all-time high of $74 a barrel, the realisation of depleting resources stares us in the face. Severe power shortage is already crimping economic growth and adding to back-up costs. The government plans to provide every citizen access to electricity by 2012. To do so, it will require an additional 100,000 MW of generating capacity to meet the goal.
The fuel scenario is as bad as that of power. R Seshasayee, president, Confederation of Indian Inudustry (CII), says, “India is deeply and excessively dependent on the imports of oil with more than 70% of our total consumption being imported. We should set ourselves a target of cutting consumption by 7%, which would translate to about Rs 9,000 crore of savings on the oil import bill at today’s prices.”
International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2005 projects that by 2030 India will be consuming 5.6 million barrels of oil a day, of which 94% will be met by imports. As such the country’s import dependence on petroleum is 70% or 95 million tonnes of oil per year. Experts suggest that the black gold crunch is not a passing phase and chances of a brighter scenario for the consumers are slim with $100-a-barrel oil prices very much in sight.
So is there reason to panic? Well, estimates suggest that 15 million barrels of new capacity will be discovered by 2010 in the world. Despite the geological evidence of plenty of oil in the ground, one cannot rule out uncertainties.
Finding new oil fields is hard, but not impossible. For instance, in the past three years, Apache, an American oil company, has discovered almost double the quantity of what it has sold by buying mature fields from bigger companies like Shell and BP and extracting more oil from them. “Energy efficient initiatives need to be taken. India currently has a shortfall of 12% on the demand side at peak hours. There is approximately 20%...
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