The Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Rameswar Teli in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha informed that the various steps/initiatives have been taken by Government to bring down imports and increase the production of domestic crude oil. These, inter-alia, include Discovered Small Field Policy, Reforms in Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy for enhancing domestic exploration and production of Oil & Gas 2019, Natural Gas Marketing Reforms 2020, Policy to promote and incentivize enhanced recovery methods for Oil and Gas, Redevelopment of existing matured fields and development of new/marginal fields, Revival of Sick Wells, improving recovery factors through the implementation of Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) and Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques, etc. Government has also promoted wider private sector participation by streamlining approval processes including/through electronic single window mechanism. Further, Government has launched National Biofuel Policy, 2018 to boost availability of biofuels in the country and to increase the usage of alternate fuels like Ethanol, Bio-diesel, and Bio-CNG through ethanol blending, bio-diesel blending and Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT) initiatives respectively.
As per the data maintained by Directorate of Sugar and Vegetable Oils, Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, the total number of ethanol plants set up during the last two years are 53, out of which 9 are in the State of Uttar Pradesh.
Various Research and Development (R&D) activities on Green Hydrogen are undertaken by Oil and Gas PSUs (OGPSUs) including projects which use Green Hydrogen for fuel cell-based mobility. The R&D Centres of OGPSUs have already replaced Grey Hydrogen consumption completely with Green Hydrogen for R&D activities. Further, OGPSUs have formed a Hydrogen Corpus Fund to fund R&D on various facets of Hydrogen including its application as an Automotive Fuel. A pilot project has also been set up to produce green hydrogen by Oil India Ltd (OIL) at Jorhat, Assam.
