Petroleum Minister Pradhan launches country's first natural gas Exchange

Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan launched the Indian Gas Exchange (IGX), the country's first natural gas Exchange here on Monday.

IGX is India's first automated national level trading platform to promote and sustain an efficient and robust gas market and to foster gas trading in the country.

Pradhan, while launching the Indian Gas Exchange (IGX), said, "In a free market, the consumer should be the king. Prime Minister Narendra Modi very ambitiously put forth a philosophy in front of all of us that the government has no business to be in the business," said the Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister after launch IGX here in the national capital.

The platform features multiple buyers and sellers to trade in spot and forward contracts at designated physical hubs. IGX is a neutral and transparent market place where both buyers and sellers will trade gas as the underlying commodity.

On his keynote address, Pradhan said that the government will have a new tariff policy 'very soon'.

"PNGRB is the authorized body to notify that. The Government of India and PNGRB working in tandem to bring a very progressive and pro-business tariff policy very soon. PNGRB is the autonomous regulator. They will also have a limited role in that," said Pradhan.

He added: "They will fulfill the framework of the government of India, but exchanges will play a bigger role for the free and open market. Today all the global stakeholders are part of this event. India is committed to becoming the growth centre of the global economy."

Pradhan said that the "COVID-19 pandemic has drastically hampered economic activities across the world as well as in India too".

"Slowed economic activities have also impacted our energy demand for the short term. But as we are now on the path of full-swing businesses resumption, growth in energy demand has been witnessed," he said.

"The Hon'ble Prime Minister has given us the vision to become 'Atma Nirbhar Bharat' with a focus to augment our domestic manufacturing capacities and capabilities. This mission is going to drive our industries to become economically competitive and to be at par in global quality standards," he said.

The Union Petroleum Minister said that the Government has given a "thrust to expand the gas infrastructure coverage" for increasing the share of natural gas in our primary energy mix.

"In this direction, we are also progressively moving towards the creation of a free gas market in the country. He said that the present LNG terminal capacity is 39.2 MMTPA which is being augmented to 50 MMTPA in the next 2-3 years," he said further.

Pradhan further informed that the LNG terminals have been developed on Western as well as the Eastern coast of the country to meet the diversified gas import portfolio.

At present country is having long term LNG tie-up with different countries of the world including the Middle East, Russia, the USA, and Australia, etc. for the LNG supply.

( With inputs from ANI )