India to double Oil Refining capacity in next 5 years: PM Narendra Modi -

New Delhi: – Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that there is a plan to double the fuel storage capacities, in the country, over the next five years. The Prime Minister also underlined that the government is making efforts to increase the use of natural gas four times.

The Prime Minister participated in the convocation ceremony of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Petroleum University, at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, via videoconferencing. At this time, he gave information about the energy requirements of India and the measures taken by the government in that respect. The Prime Minister said that the government has made a resolve to double the fuel storage capacity, in the country, over the next five years. The Prime Minister clarified that the plans are being prepared for the same.

While speaking at a function in June, Union Minister for Petroleum, Dharmendra Pradhan, had said that the country would double oil storage capacity in the next ten years. Increased use of clean and economical natural gas, will reduce the dependence on crude oil imports. The Prime Minister said, as of today, the natural gas share in the country’s fuel consumption is a meagre 6%. But the government is making focussed efforts to increase this share, at least four times. The Prime Minister said that the non-conventional energy generation would be taken to 175 Gigawatts by 2022 and 450 Gigawatts till 2030 and pointed out that this capacity was only 75 Gigawatts till the end of 2018.

Meanwhile, the Oil India Limited has started a campaign to locate natural gas stocks, in the Mahanadi river basin, in Odisha. Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan inaugurated the campaign on Friday. ₹2.2 billion will be spent on this campaign. Seismic data of 8215 Square Kilometres will be collected and analysed, under this campaign, to locate fuel deposits. There are oil and natural gas deposits spread across Puri, Khurda, Katak, Kendrapara, Balasore, Bhadrak, Keauzar and Mayrbhanji, in Odisha.