Year-End- Review of Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas

What is the news?

The Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas has launched several initiatives to boost the Petroleum & Natural Gas sector.

These initiatives are:

Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana(PMUY) 2.0

Refill Portability: It enables customers to choose his/ her distributor at the time of booking the refill. Under this, a customer not satisfied with services of his parent distributor can pick any distributor from the list of distributors of the same company serving in his locality/area. This would create competition and result in better customer satisfaction.

Hassle-free Non-subsidised LPG Connection (Across the counter): Under this, LPG Non-subsidised domestic connection can be issued across the counter with the submission of requisite proof of ID and self-declaration of address by the customer. 

Ethanol Blended Petrol (EBP) Programme

National Policy on Biofuels-2018: It envisages an indicative target of 20% blending of ethanol in petrol and 5% blending of biodiesel in diesel by 2030.

Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT): It has been launched to extract economic value from biomass waste in the form of Compressed BioGas (CBG) and bio-manure.

Discovered Small Field (DSF) Policy: It was launched in 2015 for awarding discovered acreages and monetize the unmonetized discoveries. The policy has multiple attractive features like revenue sharing contract model with low regulatory burden, no minimum biddable work programme, no prior technical qualification required, etc.  

Setting up of Pressure Swing adsorption (PSA) Oxygen Plants: A total of 101 Plants are commissioned and others are at a later stage of commissioning.

Setting up of Jumbo facilities: In some refineries, LMO (Liquid Medical Oxygen)  is not produced, but Oxygen at low pressure is available. This cannot be liquefied or transported via cylinders. As this Oxygen can be used for medical purposes, hence jumbo Covid care Facilities have been set up adjacent to the refinery premises.

Source: This post is based on the article ‘Year-End- Review of Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas’ published in PIB on 23^rd Dec 2021.