Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination

Topic: India Energy Outlook 2021 Report

Why in News?

• Recently, the International Energy Agency has released the India Energy Outlook 2021 report which examines the opportunities and challenges faced by the planet’s third-largest energy-consuming country as it seeks to recover from the COVID-19 crisis.

Key Highlights

Energy Consumption

• India will make up the biggest share of energy demand growth at 25% over the next two decades, as it overtakes the European Union as the world's third-biggest energy consumer by 2030.
• India's energy consumption is expected to nearly double as the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) expands to an estimated $8.6 trillion by 2040 under its current national policy scenario. This is underpinned by a rate of GDP growth that adds the equivalent of another Japan to the world economy by 2040.

Oil Demand

• India's oil demand is expected to rise to 8.7 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2040 from about 5 million bpd in 2019 while its refining capacity will reach 6.4 million bpd by 2030 and 7.7 million bpd by 2040, from 5 million bpd.
• The world's second-biggest net oil importer after China currently imports about 76% of its crude oil needs. That reliance on overseas oil is expected to rise to 90% by 2030 and 92% by 2040.
• Rising oil demand could double India's oil import bill to about $181 billion by 2030 and nearly treble it to $255 billion by 2040 compared with 2019.

Gas Demand

• The world's fourth-largest LNG importer, which ships in about half of its natural gas needs by tanker currently, is spending billions of dollars to build infrastructure to boost use of the cleaner fuel.
• Liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports are expected to quadruple to 124 billion cubic metres (bcm), or about 61% of overall gas demand by 2040. That would be up from imports of 76 bcm, or about 58% of gas consumption by 2030.

Imports Reliance

• India's growing energy needs will make it more reliant on fossil fuel imports as its domestic oil and gas production has been stagnant for years despite government policies to promote petroleum exploration and production and renewable energy.

Urbanisation and industrialisation in India

• Over the period to 2040, an estimated 270 million people are likely to be added to India’s urban population, the equivalent of adding a new city the size of Los Angeles every year.
• Even with such rapid urbanisation on a very large scale, the share of India’s population living in urban areas in 2040 is still expected to be less than 50%.
• Urbanisation underpins a massive increase in total residential floor space from less than 20 billion square metres today to more than 50 billion in two decades’ time.
• This prompts huge growth in demand for energy-intensive building materials.

International Energy Agency

• The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1974 in the wake
  of the 1973 oil crisis.
• The IEA was initially dedicated to responding to physical disruptions in the supply of oil, as well as serving as an information source on statistics about the international oil market and other energy sectors.

India Energy Outlook 2021 Report

• The India Energy Outlook 2021 is a new special report from the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook series.
• The report examines pathways out of the crisis that emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as longerterm trends, exploring how India’s energy sector might evolve to 2040 under a range of scenarios.