- Wednesday, April 24, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S largest oil firm Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) has renewed a deal to purchase up to two million tonnes of crude oil in 2022 from Russian oil producer Rosneft, the Russian oil producer said.
In February last year, IOC had signed a deal with Rosneft to import up to two million tonnes of oil via Russia’s Novorossiysk port on the Black Sea.
This year, the deal envisaged supply of up to 1.7 million tonnes of crude oil but the IOC bought just on parcel or shipload as the transport cost made it financially unviable when compared to alternatives.
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India has tied up supplies from Russia to the United States to diversify its oil-import basket, reducing on the Middle East to meet its oil requirements.
“Rosneft and IOC signed a contract for the supply of up to 2 million tonnes of oil to India through the port of Novorossiysk by the end of 2022,” the Russian oil firm said on its website.
Putin in India: Eyes on defence, energy ties
The signing between the two oil companies took place during the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin to India. He met Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi in what was their first in-person meeting in two years. The two leaders held bilateral talks in an expanded format.
“The signing of a new contract for the supply of oil confirms the strategic nature of the long-term partnership between Rosneft and Indian Oil,” Igor Sechin, chief executive officer of Rosneft, told Press Trust of India.
“It is important that cooperation between the companies develops in an integral format and covers the entire technological chain – from extraction to the sale of raw materials. I hope that our interaction with Indian Oil will develop within the framework of other projects,” he added.
India’s ministry of external affairs, which listed out 28 agreements that were signed between the two old allies during Putin’s visit, said the crude-oil supply agreement “seeks to renew the previous contract between Rosneft and IOC”.
The ministry also informed that IOC signed a statement of intent of collaboration with Russian petrochemicals company SIBUR to explore the feasibility of establishing a dual-feed cracker along with downstream units at its 15 million tonnes a year refinery in Paradeep in the eastern state of Odisha.
