India Readies for the Roadmap for Shale Gas Development

As the Shale Gas policy is expected early next year, India has accelerated the progress towards achieving the best results from the developments around the unconventional gas resource. CII and Pandit Deen Dayal Petroleum University has organized a 2 day “India US Bilateral Conference on Shale Gas” at New Delhi. The industry and business fraternity has come together to discuss the issues that are posing challenges for the growth of this sector. US is already leading the efforts in Shale Gas and has been commercially exploiting Shale Gas since last few years. The biggest net result being that many LNG import terminals in US are now seeking licenses for conversion of regasification terminals to liquefaction terminals, in order to accommodate the surge in domestic gas production. Such interesting turn around market dynamics attributable to Shale Gas have led many nations to initiate and attempt the best moves and India is closely monitoring these developments.
The conference was opened on a thoughtful note by highlighting the workshop held on Shale Gas in PDPU last year with collaboration from Okhlahoma University and the visionary intention of establishing a Shale Gas Excellency Centre in India. Mr. DJ Pandian, Principal Secretary (Energy & Petrochemical Department), Government of Gujarat spoke on the persisting gas supply constraints in a developing economy like ours. He said that on the positive note, the demand of gas is supply driven and has been rightly captured by aggressively provisioning for natural gas transportation infrastructure in Western and Northern India. Highlighting that the recently cleared trunk-pipelines by PNGRB, upcoming R-LNG terminals at Dabhol and Kochi, and many proposed R-LNG terminals across the East and West coast would still not be able to meet the growing gas demand. Moreover, the natural gas consumption has penetrated rightly across the sectors, which started from fertilizer and power, but gas is now welcomed in steel and CGD sectors. With the decreasing availability of domestic gas and higher prices of imported gas in the form of LNG; the burgeoning demand for natural gas would need to be addressed by tapping the domestic un-conventional gas resource in the form of Shale Gas.
Mr. Pandian emphasized that it took US 20 years to commercialize the Shale Gas resource and India is in discussions with US to understand how best to capitalize on this resource that holds high promises for the energy industry. He also pressed the point that the Shale Gas basins in India need to be studied from the prospects of the underlying geology, economics, environmental impacts; and in this concern the knowledge transfer becomes all the more important. He further said that Gujarat is well poised to take the lead in developing the Shale Gas Excellency Centre in India, for promotion and development of Shale Gas in India. The role of government, states and institutions becomes critical to achieve this.
The two day conference would dwell on best practices in shale gas production with specific focus on seismic and Petrophysical consideration in evaluating and producing shale gas resources. How production of shale gas can contribute towards the energy security of the country? The discussion on various technological options including its feasibility with respect to economics, infrastructure, supply chain, logistic and shale gas exploration by 2020 to suite Indian business environment. The conference would also focus on Raodmap on strategy and policy developments that will provide impetus to the future of shale gas in India including industry expectation from future regulations.
New Delhi
19th March 2012