While referring to India as a ‘brother and a great neighbour’ Iranian oil minister Rostam Ghasemi on Monday offered its oil fields on lucrative terms and also suggested routing the proposed Farzad-B gas pipeline through sea to avoid its passage through Pakistan provided India increased its oil imports from Iran.
India has pruned Iranian oil imports by almost a fifth since December, from 27,0380 barrels per day to 22,4532 now the sharpest cut among Asian importers. Compared with a year ago period oil imports from Iran fell sharply by 40%.
India has cut oil imports from Iran as United States and European sanctions made payments in foreign currency impossible besides making it difficult to find ships and insurance for refineries processing oil from the Persian Gulf nation.
The sharp cut in oil imports has affected Iran which is keen that India continues to import oil from the Gulf nation and that is the reason why Iran has opened its doors and offered certain incentives to India including acquisition of oil fields on lucrative terms.
Iran mounted a high-level delegation led by its oil minister Ghasemi to impress upon New Delhi to raise oil purchases which were cut to 13.3 million tons in 2012-13 from 18 million tons in the previous year.
This year imports are slated to fall further with Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) which bought 3.9 million tons of Iranian oil in 2012-13 not importing any so far this fiscal.
“We had a very fruitful meeting,” Ghasemi said describing India as brother and great neighbour. “There is great relation and history between the two countries,” he said after a nearly two-and-a-half hour meeting with his Indian counterpart, Oil Minister M Veerappa Moily.
While Ghasemi refused to divulge details of discussion, Moily said there were certain issues and difficulties that need to be resolved in apparent reference of Western sanctions making import as well as investing in Iran difficult.
Both ministers refused to give out any specifics of the discussion that they had but said, “We had a good discussions. It is natural that our meetings are about the energy sector.”
Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline has been on drawing board for more than a decade due to New Delhi’s reluctance to join. Tehran wants ONGC’s foreign arm, ONGC Videsh Limited to quickly invest and develop the Farzad-B gas field which is estimated to hold 21.68 trillion cubic feet (TFC) of reserves of which 12.8 TFC can be recovered.
OVL has delayed investing $5 billion in bringing the field to production for the fear of being sanctioned by the US.