The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the petroleum ministry’s proposal to allow GAIL (India) to sign the gas sale & purchase agreement (GSPA) with TurrnenGas for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (Tapi) gas pipeline project, said a government release.
While the statement did not mention the price at which gas would be imported, people close to the development said the landed price of the gas would be cheaper than the import price of Qatari gas in 2018. Qatar’s RasGas charges 12.67 per cent of the price of Japanese crude cocktail and Petronet pays another $0.26 per million British thermal units (mBtu) for shipping the gas in its liquid form from Qatar. This currently stands at $8-10 per mBtu.
The $7.6-billion Tapi project envisages building 1,680 km of pipelines, with a total gas capacity of 90 million standard cubic metres per day.
Other Cabinet decisions
The Cabinet on Thursday cleared new amendments in the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha earlier this month to give the wife a clearly defined share in a husband’s immovable residential properties. It also retained the mandatory six-month cooling-off period for divorces with mutual consent.
The Cabinet also cleared the Agriculture Bio-Security Bill that would introduce stricter norms for the import of agri-food products.
