PM Modi to meet oil company chiefs today to fire up fuel economy

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will exchange notes with a clutch of global and domestic oil company chief executives on Monday on ways to reduce India's oil imports and create a gas-based economy.

Government sources counted Bob Dudley, chief executive of BP Plc; Igor Sechin, head of Russian oil giant Rosneft and a close confidante of President Vladimir Putin; Amin H Nasser, chief executive of the world's largest oil exporter Saudi Aramco; and Robert S Franklin, vice-president of ExxonMobil, among those who are expected to be at the session.

This will be Modi's second session with captains and experts of global oil industry, where the government's think-tank Niti Aayog is playing a key role.

The PM had on January 5, 2016 held a session on increasing domestic production of oil and gas as well as ways to attract larger investments in the domestic oil industry.

That meeting was attended by finance minister Arun Jaitley, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Piyush Goyal, who was then the minister for power, coal and renewable energy.

Pulitzerwinning oil historian and vice-president of oil industry data service provider IHS Markit, Daniel Yergin, who has emerged as India's key interlocutor in the US for energy issues, also attended the session.

Such direct interactions have fuelled key policy drives targeted at meeting the target of reducing India's import dependence by 10% over the next seven years and creating a gas-based economy set by the PM on March 28, 2015.

The PM's last session with oilmen had set the stage for key initiatives to make it easier for explorers to do business in India and oil market reforms such as deregulation of diesel pricing, market-pricing for gas from difficult discoveries and a more transparent exploration policy based on revenue-share instead of profit-share.

Monday's session will take place against the backdrop of IHS Markit's 'India Energy Forum by CERAWeek', an industry jamboree that lists Aramco's Nasser, Opec secretary-general Mohammad Barkindo, transport minister Nitin Gadkari besides Pradhan and Goyal among the speakers.