Hardeep Puri Explains How India Is Rewriting Its Energy Map As Wars Rage On

In the quiet war rooms of India's petroleum ministry, a geopolitical reshuffling of historic proportions has been underway. What began as an emergency response to the Ukraine conflict in 2022 has now accelerated - pushed further by the Middle East crisis - into a wholesale transformation of where India buys its oil and gas.

Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, speaking exclusively to NDTV's Senior Executive Editor Aditya Raj Kaul, laid out the scale of the shift: India has gone from sourcing crude from 27 countries to actively purchasing from 41 nations. The diversification is not merely diplomatic - it is a calculated exercise in energy arithmetic that touches Russia, Venezuela, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and the Gulf states simultaneously.

The Russia chapter is the most dramatic. Before November 2022, Russia accounted for just 0.2 per cent of India's crude imports. Today, Puri confirmed, India is buying approximately 2.5 million barrels per day from Russia, a 12-fold increase. Even in February of this year, as the Middle East crisis was escalating, India bought 1.04 million barrels per day from Russia, he said. The minister addressed Western concerns about this arrangement directly: "We will buy energy from wherever it is available at the most reasonable price. Our purchases are tenders issued at the point of importation."

The Venezuela story is newer and geopolitically charged. Venezuela holds the world's largest proven oil reserves but had, until recently, been selling primarily to China and Cuba under a bilateral arrangement facilitated by the Trump-Maduro era. When that arrangement collapsed, with the Trump administration effectively banning Venezuelan oil exports to China, India moved in. "India is present there," Puri said. "Venezuela has become a big seller, 500,000 barrels a day or so."

Puri revealed that he has met Venezuela's acting president Delcy Rodriguez on multiple occasions, including at India Energy Week, and that the country's heavy crude - known as HFE crude - is compatible with Asian refineries, including India's. OVL, India's overseas oil investment arm, already has financial exposure in Venezuela, giving New Delhi added leverage in ramping up those purchases. The minister said imports from Venezuela could scale up further if production is helped to rise from the current one million barrels per day toward three million.

On the United States front, Puri disclosed that India has already purchased $15 billion worth of energy from the US and signalled that this figure could rise to $20-25 billion depending on pricing. This comes as negotiations on a broader India-US trade deal near completion, with the US envoy recently suggesting only one per cent of the deal remains to be finalised. Puri said the energy trade fits naturally into this diplomatic framework, even as he emphasised that actual energy purchases are commercially driven, not government-mandated.

The minister also narrated a revealing anecdote about how personal diplomacy plugged a critical LPG gap. Early in the crisis, worried about LPG supply through the Strait of Hormuz, Puri personally called Sultan Al Jaber, the head of Abu Dhabi's ADNOC, requesting additional LPG cargoes. Al Jaber arranged the supply - and then called Puri late at night to say the cargoes were ready but India's ships had not arrived. "Your ships are not here," Puri recalled being told. A scramble through oil marketing companies followed, and by the next morning, the logistics had been resolved.

Beyond import diversification, Puri pointed to India's longer-term energy transition: scaling biofuel blending from 1.5 per cent to 20 per cent, introducing E85 flex-fuel motorcycles, and building green hydrogen capacity. "Availability, affordability, sustainability - on all three fronts of energy, we are doing all right," he said.