Pakistan willing to buy petro products

Pakistan was ready to buy petroleum products from India if these were offered at “right prices”, the country’s minister of Petroleum and Natural Resources Asim Hussain said on Tuesday.

“A team from HPCL (Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd) will come to Pakistan very soon to discuss prices,” Hussain told reporters on the sidelines of the Petrotech 2012 conference. “If right prices are given, we have no problems in importing.”

He said, Pakistan could import petroleum fuels from India both via pipelines and sea routes.

Fuel-deficit Pakistan had in March this year removed petrol from the list of banned imports from India. Though diesel imports are permitted from 2009, Indian oil companies have found it difficult to match the price Pakistan gets from its West Asian trading partners, mainly Kuwait.

Trade ties between the two nations have shown signs of a revival recently. Early this year, Pakistan notified its negative list for India, barring 1,209 items. The negative list includes products such as automobiles and textiles. Pakistan also agreed in-principle to grant India the “most favoured nation” status over 15 years after it was given the same status by India.

In March, Pakistan’s then Petroleum and Natural Resources secretary Muhammad Ejaz Chaudhry had discussed with his Indian counterpart G C Chaturvedi the possibility of Pakistan buying petroleum fuels from India.

India and Pakistan plan to set up a 200-km pipeline from Bathinda in Punjab to Lahore in Pakistan. India has surplus refining capacity, and is a major exporter of oil products, while Pakistan meets most of its needs through imports from West Asian countries.

India has a refining capacity of 213 million tonnes (mt) per annum, while the country’s domestic requirement is 148 mt. It plans to further expand refining capacity to 310 mt per annum by the end of March 2017, when the consumption is expected to be 186 mt with an increased exportable surplus of 124 mt.

In April, HPCL had inaugurated the 9-mt Bathinda refinery near the India-Pakistan border, which was developed under a joint venture with Mittal Energy Investment Pte Ltd.

Apart from HPCL, IndianOil Corp Ltd will also benefit from oil trade with Pakistan as the company has an oil storage depot in Bathinda, and a 12-mt refinery in Panipat, Haryana.

The Pakistan minister also said his country would offer 60 oil and gas exploration blocks in two months, and would discuss with his Indian counterpart the possibilities of offering some blocks to Indian companies on a bilateral basis.