The expected forthcoming visit of Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia to New Delhi assumes significance with India assuming the Presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20) for one year starting from December 2022.
For India, the G20 Presidency is a turning point for deepening global footprints and reassuring its commitment to shared peace and prosperity for the world order, especially highlighting environmental concerns.
At present, the question of sustainable development has come to centerstage in the world. Fossil fuel resources are depleting and fast becoming uneconomic for exploitation. The urgency of the present generation for ‘green development’, i.e., reducing carbon footprints while ensuring economic growth is also important to reckon with.
Although India and Saudi Arabia have been great partners in energy trade, the current thrust on green growth calls for enhancing collaboration among the countries of the world in conservation as well as green technology-based energy. There is a vast scope for Saudi Arabia- India cooperation in this area.
Energy consumption worldwide grew by 2.3 per cent in 2018, nearly twice the average rate of growth since 2010 and now it is maintaining the same growth rate. If we keep burning fossil fuels at our current rate, it is generally estimated that all our fossil fuels will be depleted by 2060. And, if the world is trying to limit global warming to the ‘relatively’ safe level of 2oC by 2050, 80 per cent of coal, 50 per cent of gas and 30 per cent of oil reserves would be “un-burnable”. Along with this, as the oil availability will go down, its exploration and production would also be much costlier.
The issue of energy cooperation in this light, therefore, becomes extremely important. Saudi Arabia, is an important supplier of energy and India is an important consumer and so these could become an example of smooth transition to more efficient energy production and use. While India is trying to develop renewable energy, technology especially in solar power and wind energy, there is a lot of scope for cooperation between the two countries.
India is a key Asian refining hub, with an installed capacity of nearly 250 million tonnes per annum across 23 refineries, with plans to grow this to 400 mtpa by 2025. Being a major importer of Saudi oil, India had longstanding trade and energy cooperation with the country.
