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Unstable World and Energy Sovereignty
Context: India’s energy landscape is defined by a critical vulnerability: over 85% of its crude oil and 50% of its natural gas are imported, constituting a quarter of its total import bill and posing a significant national security risk.
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- Historically, global energy security has been reshaped by shocks—from the 1973 oil embargo to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war—each teaching that sovereignty is impossible without diversification and resilience.
- Despite the global push for transition, fossil fuels still dominate, creating a structurally tight market.
What is energy security?
- Energy security is the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price. For a nation, it means ensuring that its citizens, industries, and military have reliable access to the energy needed for economic stability and national security without being subject to disruptive shocks or geopolitical coercion.
- In the modern context, energy security also includes the stability of the entire energy system, from generation and import infrastructure to transmission grids and storage capabilities, ensuring resilience against physical, cyber, and geopolitical threats.
What are the major challenges to India’s energy security?
- High Import Dependence: The foremost challenge is India’s heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels (oil and gas), which exposes the economy to volatile global prices and supply disruptions, strains foreign exchange reserves, and widens the trade deficit.
- Geopolitical Volatility: A significant portion of India’s imports traditionally transited through volatile regions like the Strait of Hormuz.
- Concentrated Supply Sources: While diversification has improved, over-reliance on any single partner (e.g., Russia for crude) creates new vulnerabilities to geopolitical shifts or potential secondary sanctions.
- Inadequate Domestic Production: Stagnant domestic production of oil and gas fails to keep pace with rapidly growing demand, perpetuating import dependence.
- Financing the Energy Transition: The enormous capital required to develop domestic alternatives like renewables, nuclear, green hydrogen, and storage infrastructure is a significant hurdle.
- Grid Resilience and Integration: As the share of intermittent renewable energy (solar, wind) grows, managing grid stability, ensuring adequate storage (like pumped hydro), and maintaining a dispatchable power base (like nuclear or gas) become critical technical challenges.
- Global Climate Pressures: International pressure to decarbonise necessitates a careful and costly balancing act between using domestic fossil resources (like coal), ensuring affordable energy, and investing in a green transition.
What measures have been taken to address India’s energy security?
- Diversification of Energy Sources:
- Russian Oil: Capitalised on discounted Russian crude to reduce costs and diversify away from traditional West Asian suppliers.
- Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPRs): Built underground reserves in Vishakhapatnam, Mangaluru, and Padur to buffer against supply disruptions for approximately 9.5 days.
- Ethanol Blending Programme: Mandated blending ethanol with petrol, aiming for E20 (20% ethanol) by 2025-26.
- Promotion of Domestic Alternatives:
- SATAT Scheme: Promotes the establishment of Compressed Biogas (CBG) plants to produce biogas from agricultural waste, providing clean fuel and organic manure.
- Coal Gasification: Initiatives to leverage India’s vast coal reserves through gasification to produce syngas, methanol, and hydrogen, reducing import dependency.
- Renewable Energy Push: Ambitious targets of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030, focusing on solar and wind power.
- Building Future Resilience:
- Green Hydrogen Mission: A National Mission aims to make India a global hub for the production and export of Green Hydrogen, targeting 5 MMT per annum by 2030.
- Nuclear Energy: Efforts to revive the nuclear sector, including the thorium program and exploring Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) for dispatchable, zero-carbon power.
- Pumped Storage Projects (PSPs): Policy push to develop PSPs, which are crucial for grid balancing and storing renewable energy.
