Refiners to ready Iraq contingency plans - govt source

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The government has asked state-controlled oil refiners to prepare contingency plans to deal with possible supply outages caused by the conflict in Iraq, a senior Oil Ministry official told Reuters on Tuesday.

"We have asked them to be ready with a back-up plan. They should have a contingency plan ready to avoid any supply disruption from Iraq," said the official, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

India, the world's fourth-largest oil consumer, imports around 4 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil. Of that, OPEC member Iraq supplies more than half a million barrels daily.

Among options under consideration are drawing additional volumes from current suppliers and buying from the spot market.

"We are not unduly perturbed at this point. As of now we don't see much of a problem ... if need be we will look at alternatives as we have contracts with Saudi Arabia and ADNOC," said an official at Hindustan Petroleum Corp .

HPCL aims to buy 105,000 barrels per day of Iraqi oil in 2014 compared with about 100,000 bpd last year.

The country's biggest refiner, Indian Oil Corp which is also Iraq's biggest India oil client, has an annual deal to buy 284,000 bpd Iraqi oil in 2014 compared to 270,000 bpd in 2013.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma; Editing by Douglas Busvine)