BP to invest $2 billion over next few years
MUMBAI: BP India plans to invest more than $2 billion in its upstream ventures in the Indian market over the next few years, said Sashi Mukundan, BP Group’s regional president and head of India.
Over the next decade, Mukundan said, he expects 10% of BP’S global earnings to come from India as the British oil and gas firm bets on the country’s growing energy demand and plans to invest in cutting-edge renewable and alternate energy technologies. In FY2017, BP posted total earnings of $6.2 billion, more than double of what it reported in 2016.
In the past seven years, BP has invested more than $8 billion in India, with over $7 billion invested in exploration and production.
With its partner Reliance Industries (RIL), BP also plans to produce 10% of India’s total gas demand by 2022. The company partners RIL in four hydrocarbon blocks in the country which include—kg D6, R-series, D55 and NEC 25, in the Mahanadi basin.
“By 2022, we will have all three projects (KG D6, R-series, D55 ) up and running and we should get to our peak production by 2023 with around 30-35 million metric standard cubic metres per day (mmscmd). That’s a billion cubic feet of gas a day and if you look at the forecast for gas demand in India, that is about 10% of India’s gas demand by 2022,” Mukundan said in an interview.
India’s energy demand is expected to rise as its economy expands and more people gain access to power, cooking gas and personal transport.
India plans to increase the proportion of gas usage in its energy mix to 15% from the current 6.5%. The world average of gas use in the total energy consumption is 24%.
BP and RIL will start natural gas production from the R-SEries gas field in the KG-D6 block in Bay of Bengal by 2020 while gas production from other fields will start by 2021. BP holds a 33.33% stake in the KG-D6 block, while RIL holds the rest.
Last June, BP and RIL announced an investment of ₹40,000 crore in their hydrocarbon blocks.