Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Imagine keeping a spare tank of cooking gas in the store room, not for daily use, but purely for the day the regular supply is disrupted. India's Strategic Petroleum Reserve is that spare tank, scaled up to a national level and buried in underground rock caverns rather than sitting in a cylinder.

Managed by a government special purpose vehicle called ISPRL, India's SPR currently holds 5.33 million metric tonnes of crude oil across three underground locations, Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, and Mangaluru and Padur in Karnataka. At full capacity, this is estimated to cover roughly 9.5 days of India's crude oil requirement, on top of separate commercial stocks that oil marketing companies routinely hold at refineries and depots.

Given that India imports close to 89 percent of the crude oil it consumes, a sudden supply shock, a war, a shipping blockade, a sanctions episode, can hit the country hard within days rather than months. The SPR exists to buy the government time to react to exactly that kind of disruption, and the government has approved a second phase adding 6.5 million tonnes of additional capacity at Chandikhol in Odisha and a second facility at Padur, run this time on a public private partnership basis.