India & Saudi Arabia: Natural Resources, Oil & Energy

By Valentina Horlander*

New Delhi. India’s consumption of natural resources has been unparalleled in comparison to other under-developed countries.

Map about India energy resources

It is a country that is rich in natural resources including gas and mineral deposits, with the fourth largest coal reserve in the world.

In spite of this, India is a huge consumer of fuel and oil. Due to its huge population of around 1.3 billion people, the rates at which they consume is massive, at around 4.4 million BpD (barrels of fuel a day.)

This makes India the third largest consumer of oil in the world, right behind the United States and China.

 

India Energy

In order to keep up with such high demand, not only do they use their own domestic supply, but they import fossil fuels from places such as Saudi Arabia, as 60% of India’s oil comes from the Middle East.

Recently Saudi Arabia, one of the largest exporters in fossil fuels in the world, has increased the price of oil exports into Asia.

The increase is due to the OPEC+ cartel coming to the decision of increasing production during the summer months because of higher demand. In the far Eastern countries of the world, including India, they are seeing an increase of .20 cents to .50 cents per barrel of light to heavy crude oil prices.

This is vastly due to the world economy balancing itself from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since last year, Saudi Arabia has been cutting their production of crude oil, which in turn lowered the cost of fossil fuels because top importers did not have as much need for gas and oil.

Saudi Arabia has been cutting their production of crude oil

Now that Europe and the America’s are stabilizing their own economy, Saudi Arabia can begin increasing production to levels pre-COVID.

This is unfortunate for under-developed countries like India, who are still struggling with COVID and its affect on their economy for a much longer period than developed countries.

In retaliation to this, India is now aiming to import more oil from the United States and Africa, effectively cutting their imports from Saudi Arabia by a third.

If India follows through, Saudi Arabia will lose one of their highest exporting nation.

 

It is still unclear how this will influence the Middle Easts trade of natural resources with Asia.

*South Asia Analyst

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