Hydrocarbon

Think of hydrocarbons as one large extended family of chemical compounds, all built from just two elements, hydrogen and carbon, combined in different arrangements and chain lengths. Crude oil, natural gas and coal are all, at their chemical core, hydrocarbons, differing mainly in how their hydrogen and carbon atoms are arranged and how energy dense the resulting substance is.

This shared chemistry is why the industry so often uses the umbrella term hydrocarbons rather than naming oil and gas separately, since a single exploration block, particularly under HELP, can contain both oil and gas, along with related resources like coal bed methane, all technically hydrocarbons found in the same geological setting.

Every time a ministry press release talks about India's hydrocarbon potential or hydrocarbon reserves, it is deliberately using the broader term to capture oil, gas and related resources together, rather than referring to any one of them specifically.