NEW DELHI: India foreign minister told energy firms on Tuesday to be more adventurous in searching for oil supplies as a report warned of a likely large rise in the country's fuel import needs.
Oil imports already make up 75 percent of consumption, a dependence which has caused India's current account deficit to soar and prompted a crash in the value of the rupee.
Import dependence is seen rising to at least 90 percent within two decades, according to a study by global consultancy Pricewaterhouse Coopers released Tuesday.
"There will have to be a sense of adventure in us... and that has to come from within the Indian psyche," Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid told an energy conference.
Khurshid said he had recently visited conflict-racked Iraq and Saudi Arabia to push energy ties and found "nothing stood between them and our opportunities" except "our unwillingness to be a little adventurous".
India in 2012 was the world's fourth-largest energy consumer at 563 million tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE), less than a fifth of heavily industrialised China with 2,735 MTOE, the report noted.
Khurshid admitted rival China has "moved ahead of us, they've come with much more resources" in securing overseas supplies. But he added India was still held in high esteem in many parts of the world, giving "us an opportunity to go there and fulfil our dreams".
China, with its deep pockets and energetic diplomacy, has been beating bureaucratic India to the punch in the quest to lock in long-term supplies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, energy analysts say.
Since oil is India's biggest import, the plummeting rupee and higher oil prices are raising its import bills.
The oil ministry is set later this month to announce austerity measures to curb fuel consumption, but will not pursue a radical proposal to close gas stations at night which sparked an outcry on Monday.
The rupee was down nearly three percent at 67.80 rupees to the dollar on Tuesday amid worries over the weak economy and troubled public finances.
But PwC said there was scant hope of significantly reducing fuel imports because domestic fuel self-sufficiency was only a "distant possibility", and India needs to acquire more energy assets abroad.
To do that "calls for encouraging very strong diplomatic ties and economic ties" with oil- and gas-producing countries, said Deepak Mahurkar, senior PwC analyst.
D.K. Sarraf, managing director of state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp's overseas arm, ONGC Videsh, said India needs its own "diplomats groomed in the energy sector to take up the cause of oil and gas more aggressively".
India has some oil and natural gas reserves in the western state of Rajasthan and the Bay of Bengal but the sectors have said that their output will grow little in the next few years.
The country's biggest gas producer Reliance Industries has seen a decline in output from its deepwater gas fields.
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