India's oil reforms to blunt US and EU supply coercion

India's energy security will get a leg up amid US President Donald Trump's tariff rumbles as the government hopes to finalize by September major reforms in the oil & gas sector, a senior government official said.

- S DINAKAR

These measures are expected to help the government deal with geopolitical pressures inflicted by countries like the US by squeezing supplies of oil via coercive methods or from armed conflicts in West Asia that block key passageways like the Suez Canal or the Strait of Hormuz through which India receives most of its oil and gas.

India's oil lobby is funding Russian President Vladimir Putin's war machine and that must stop, said Peter Navarro, White House advisor for trade and manufacturing, in an opinion piece in the Financial Times on Monday—in a move widely seen as mounting pressure on India to stop buying Russian oil. "Refining companies have turned India into a massive refining hub for discounted Russian crude," Navarro said.

The government has no say in where the country's refiners source oil from because these are commercial transactions, the official reiterated. There are no sanctions on Russian oil unlike, say, Iran or Venezuela, he added.

What Navarro conveniently forgot to mention was that China is the biggest buyer of Russian oil, gas, and liquefied natural gas and the only buyer of all sanctioned crude oil including Venezuela and Iran, industry executives said.