According to an exercise conducted jointly by the oil industry and the petroleum ministry, the demand for petroleum products is expected to more than treble in the coming two decades, increasing the country's dependence on imports to 70 per cent from 63 per cent at present. The demand for oil and gas, growing at a pace of 8.6 per cent during the Ninth Plan, should take the consumption of petroleum products to 110 million tonne by the year 2002. In 2020, the total demand for petrol, diesel, LPG, kerosene and industrial fuels should amount to 350 million tonne, compared to close to 90 million tonne last year. At present, when the country's population stands at 970 million, the total consumption of oil and gas within the country is estimated to be 111 MMTOE (million tonne of oil or oil equivalent gas.

India is expected to be a country of 1328 million people by 2020, with a cumulative appetite for 440 MMTOEof oil and gas by then. The country's oil and gas reserves being finite, the indigenous production of crude is not even expected to remain at the 35 million tonne produced at present.

The country now has in-place reserves of 6.8 billion tonne of oil and recoverable reserves of 2.5 billion tonne. The policy thrust on exploration given through the New Exploration and Licensing Policy (NELP) notwithstanding, the country is not expected to have too great a potential for producing hydrocarbons in-house.

Two successive governments have already issued directives to the national oil companies to go scouting for `equity oil' abroad. Even if oil companies at home succeed in acquiring stakes in huge oilfields overseas, the refining capacity at home could only grow by so much, to 150 million tonne to be precise.

New refineries going on stream (like the two private sector refineries of Essar Oil and Reliance Petroleum, Indian Oil Corporation's Panipat refinery and subsequently Hindustan Petroleum Corporation'sBhatinda refinery) should take the country's refining capacity to 123 million tonne by 2002 from 68 million tonne at present. Refineries on the anvil now (like Indianoil's East Coast and Nagapattinam refineries and Bharat Petroleum Corporation's Bina refinery) should become operational subsequently.

In the first six years of the new decade, the country's total refinery throughput is expected to be 161 million tonne. An additional 80 million tonne of refining capacity is expected to go on stream thereafter and by 2020-2021, India should be able to refine 150 million tonne of petroleum products.