Recently in India Category

Rain or shine, it is business as usual for the Somalian pirates, as seen by the recent attempted hijacking of the fuel-oil laden Brillante Virtuso, a Liberia-flagged Suezmax vessel.

The attack, taking place at a time when the monsoon is at its peak in the Gulf of Aden and the surrounding region, saw a fire break out near the tanker's accommodation block as a result of RPGs fired at the vessel.

No one in India seems to want to be the one to make a decision on the $9 billion Cairn-Vedanta deal.

Eight months after Cairn Energy announced its intention to sell its stake in Cairn India to Vedanta Resources, the fate of the deal still hangs in balance.

With power being the focus of Thursday's CERAWeek sessions, participants are aggressively debating the role of natural gas vs. coal in the power mix, not just today, but going forward.

The hijacking of supertanker Irene SL and Aframax tanker Savina Caylin in a spate of two days last week will pose some questions on various navies patrolling the vital sea-routes in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.

And one of them that needs to come up with some satisfying answers is the Indian Navy. There's been a series of attacks on the ships steaming in areas which are just 350 nautical miles off India's west coast since 2009, while New Delhi boasts of having the world's fifth largest navy.

It was said in 2008, when oil prices reached their all-time high, that the only countries that showed an increase in oil consumption that year were those that capped prices or subsidized them to some degree. With prices rising again, though still a long way from the 2008 peak, those subisidies are once again becoming an issue in many countries.

Every now and then, the world needs a new icon to worship. And in the energy sector, that now is shale gas. "Exciting," "promising," "game-changing" and "rocking" are some of the adjectives used to describe it.

Though digging through shale for oil and gas began more than 100 years ago, it has only recently become something that people flock to, not very different from the gold rush of days gone by. Looking at the success of the US, where shale gas is expected to rise from 42% of total gas production to 64% by 2020, the whole world is looking at shale with new eyes. Australia, Europe, China and India are all looking to shale to deliver their own golden eggs. But is it really possible to duplicate the success seen in the US elsewhere in the world?

When it comes to the resillience of refineries, it is indeed survival of the fittest. Just imagine this: just over 6 million barrels per day of new refinery capacity is expected to be added by 2015 in Asia alone. And this number is a conservative estimate by many experts.

     Cnsidering low refinery operating rates now of about 60-70 percent in Asia, that does not bode well for the industry.

The global prognosis for the airline industry is grim. The International Air Transport Association has forecast a $5.6 billion global net loss for 2010, coming right after a forecasted $11 billion loss in 2009.