Rosneft Oil Company and Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) signed a contract to supply up to 2 million tonnes of oil to India via the port of Novorossiysk by the end of 2020.
The signing took place during the visit of the Chief Executive Officer of Rosneft Igor Sechin to New Delhi. During this visit, a working meeting was also held with Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas of India.
An important subject of talks between Sechin and Pradhan was the issue of providing Indian consumers with quality crude and petroleum-based products, including increasing in Russian oil supplies to India. During the meeting, the parties discussed the ongoing joint projects of Rosneft and Indian companies, including Sakhalin-1, Taas-Yuryakh, the Vankor cluster (a consortium of Indian companies owns 49% in the Vankor cluster field), Far East LNG, and Nayara Energy.
A separate topic of discussion was the matter of Indian companies’ participation in implementing the Vostok Oil project aimed to establish a new world-class oil and gas province on the North of Russian Krasnoyarsk Territory. As Dharmendra Pradhan said, the Indian side has already made a principal decision to participate in the project. In order to negotiate the terms of Indian companies’ entering Vostok Oil in the shortest time possible the parties agreed to create a regular working group of representatives of Russian and Indian companies.
Vostok Oil’s competitive advantage lies in its proximity to the Northern Sea Route, a unique transport corridor. Its use provides the opportunity to supply crude from the project’s fields in two directions at once - to European and Asian markets. The implementation of the project guarantees that the task to increase the cargo traffic on the Northern Sea Route up to 80 million tonnes by 2024 set by the President of the Russian Federation will be achieved.
Source: Rosneft