Oil Minister H S Puri on Monday said high prices of crude oil and natural gas have “intended and unintended consequences”, which are, on the one hand, leading to a global recession, and on the other, propelling countries like India to explore alternate energy sources.
Speaking at the ADIPEC 2022 in Abu Dhabi, Puri said, “I think all policy decisions have consequences, intended and unintended. One of the unintended consequences is, perhaps it is a good consequence, that when prices rose, on one hand there is inflation and movement towards global recessionary conditions, but in India, it has also galvanised the movement in other direction. There are billions of dollars coming in — look at, for instance, at the ecosystem for electric vehicles (EVs). We have done the transition on bio-fuels. We are going in a big way on compressed bio-gas.”
Emphasising that there is pressure on the economy due to high prices, considering the energy requirements of 1.34 billion people, the minister said that availability of petrol, diesel and gas has not been impacted. The minister’s statement comes at a time whenoil marketing companies are incurring a retail loss of about ₹11-13 per litre on diesel, the mainstay of India’s transport sector.
Elaborating on the impact of high energy prices, Puri pointed out, “In order to make that (energy) transition, whatever your transition date is, you have to survive the present and the survival of the present cannot be on the terms of entire economies. There are countries around the world, where you cannot have access to energy. I am not going into the causation of why it happened. But I think the transition itself would be severely undermined if the current ability, especially large consuming countries, is not cushioned in order to make that transition.”
In India, he said the government is “very confident” of being able to make energy transition a success. “I think high energy prices, without any doubt, have a consequence which we need to factor in. But I think one of the unintended causes is that many of us are going to diversify, we are going to look at alternate energy sources faster than we had originally envisaged,” Puri added.
Published on October 31, 2022
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