Russia-backed Indian Refiner Nayara trims crude runs in wake of EU sanctions
Since the EU curbs on Nayara, traders have grown cautious in dealing with its fuel, trade and industry sources say.Last week, Reuters reported that at least two tankers skipped planned loadings at Vadinar while a tanker carrying a cargo of Russian crude was diverted away from the refiner.One source said Nayara was operating the refinery at 70% of capacity, while another put the figure at 80%.Nayara ran at more than 100% of its nameplate capacity in each of the three months through June, the most recent government data shows.All the sources sought anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media. Nayara did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Nayara typically exports at least four million barrels of refined products each month, including diesel, jet fuel, gasoline and naphtha, through traders.India has become the biggest buyer of seaborne Russian crude in the aftermath of Moscow's Ukraine invasion. Nayara, majority-owned by Russian entities including Rosneft ROSN.MM, is a key buyer of Russian oil.Nayara's chief executive resigned after the sanctions and was replaced by Sergey Denisov, who had been its chief development officer, Reuters reported on Friday.On Monday, Nayara said it filed legal proceedings against U.S. software giant Microsoft following its suspension of services to the refiner.Nayara, based in the commercial capital of Mumbai, operates more than 6,000 fuel stations.- Ends
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Indian Express
3 minutes ago
- Indian Express
MEA dials down Trump noise: India, US weathered challenges, focus on future
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We remain focused on the substantive agenda that our two countries have committed to and are confident that the relationship will continue to move forward.' Asked about India-US defence ties in the wake of reports of India refusing to consider F-35 fighter jets, the MEA spokesperson said, 'We have a strong defence partnership with the U.S. which has been strengthening over the last several years. There is potential for this partnership to grow further under the India-US COMPACT for the 21st century.' Responding to Trump's talk of a penalty on India for buying energy from Russia, Jaiswal said: 'In securing our energy needs, we are guided by what is on offer in the markets, and by the prevailing global circumstances.' Incidentally, this has been Delhi's position for the last three years, since the war in Ukraine broke out after the Russian invasion in February 2022. On Trump's tirade against India-Russia ties and that they are both 'dead economies', the MEA spokesperson said: 'Our bilateral relationships with various countries stand on their own merit and should not be seen from the prism of a third country. India and Russia have a steady and time-tested partnership.' On Trump's anger at India buying Russian defence equipment, he said, 'The sourcing of our defence requirements is determined solely by our national security imperatives and strategic assessments.' While India does depend on Russia for the defence supplies, much of it is because of the legacy from the Soviet Union era. Although the dependency is about 60 to 70 per cent, India has, in the past few years, steadily diversified its defence purchases from countries including the US. Yet, the framing by Trump — 'I don't care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care' — has been seen as offensive by many. While his criticism of India putting high tariffs has been a pet grievance from his first term — when he called India a 'tariff king' — the US President's latest statement described India's trade policies as 'most strenuous and obnoxious'. Trump's remarks deepen Delhi's diplomatic challenge when India and the US are negotiating a bilateral trade deal. There are two possible impulses that guide Trump's responses, according to Delhi's analysis. First, his negotiating style to browbeat and bully the adversary by imposing high tariffs and try and get the deal on his own terms. This has been seen with China, where he imposed 145 per cent tariffs and then dialled down to 35 – after talks in Geneva. Second, some in the Indian establishment feel that the US President has not taken very kindly to Delhi fact-checking Trump's claims on brokering a ceasefire. Not only has PM Narendra Modi conveyed this in the phone call with Trump on June 17, but Indian ministers and officials have repeatedly denied the claim. Despite not stating that President Trump is a 'liar' — as demanded by Congress leader and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi — the Indian government has forcefully contradicted the US President. But New Delhi feels that Trump's remarks threaten to undo the hard work made by the two countries as 'strategic partners' in a relationship that was framed as the 'defining partnership of the 21st century' by US President Barack Obama. South Block is, however, trying to not get drawn into an emotional and angry response, and is projecting restraint amid the US President's verbal tirade and social media blitzkrieg of epithets directed at India. While the Commerce ministry said it has 'taken note' of Trump's statement on bilateral trade and the Government is studying its implications, sources said that any response had to be shorn of emotion. 'India and the US have been engaged in negotiations on concluding a fair, balanced and mutually beneficial bilateral trade agreement over the last few months. We remain committed to that objective,' the Commerce ministry statement had said. Sources said that negotiators from both sides are in touch and they have to be immune from the noise. The diplomatic challenge is three-fold, sources said: how long can Delhi stand its ground against the US; whether India can engage with Trump's inner circle; and whether they can overcome the distrust fuelled by the Trump's comments in the long term. 'We will not get drawn into the tit-for-tat response with the US President, and our negotiators have been asked to not pay attention to Trump's unique style of public negotiations. Those are best left to be done away from the public gaze,' a source said. Shubhajit Roy, Diplomatic Editor at The Indian Express, has been a journalist for more than 25 years now. Roy joined The Indian Express in October 2003 and has been reporting on foreign affairs for more than 17 years now. Based in Delhi, he has also led the National government and political bureau at The Indian Express in Delhi — a team of reporters who cover the national government and politics for the newspaper. He has got the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award for Excellence in Journalism '2016. He got this award for his coverage of the Holey Bakery attack in Dhaka and its aftermath. He also got the IIMCAA Award for the Journalist of the Year, 2022, (Jury's special mention) for his coverage of the fall of Kabul in August 2021 — he was one of the few Indian journalists in Kabul and the only mainstream newspaper to have covered the Taliban's capture of power in mid-August, 2021. ... Read More
Indian Express
24 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Why Trump talk of Pak's ‘massive oil reserves' is hot air — not much else
US President Donald Trump's announcement on Thursday that the Americans will work with Pakistan to develop the latter's 'massive' oil reserves came as a bit of a surprise, as Pakistan is not exactly a country synonymous with oil exploration and production, unlike Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Venezuela. Far from it, Islamabad depends heavily on energy imports, has dwindling hydrocarbon production, and a rather inconsistent and uninspiring record of oil and gas exploration. There have been a few preliminary studies and reports of potential reserves over the years, but they have remained inconclusive, and the world's oil majors have so far largely steered clear of hydrocarbon exploration in Pakistan. But Trump appears convinced, at least on his own social media platform, that Pakistan is sitting on huge oil reserves. He went to the extent of saying that 'maybe' Pakistan will be 'selling oil to India some day', a remark that many have interpreted as a veiled jibe at New Delhi over its heavy imports of Russian oil, which has surfaced as an irritant in the India-US relationship. The backdrop also features the heightened tension between India and Pakistan following their military conflagration in May due to the Pahalgam terror attack by Pakistan-backed terrorists. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he brokered the ceasefire between the two countries, while India has maintained that there was no mediation by any other third country. To be sure, Pakistan's proven recoverable conventional crude oil reserves are pegged between 234 million and 353 million barrels by various estimates, while India's proven reserves are estimated at 4.8-5 billion barrels, or nearly 14 times of Pakistan's. By proven oil reserves, Pakistan is ranked between 50 and 55 in the world, compared to India's ranking in the early 20s. As for natural gas, OPEC's latest annual statistical bulletin pegs India's proven reserves at 1.15 billion cubic metres (bcm), 2.7 times of Pakistan's 0.43 bcm. Pakistan's oil production is estimated at around 60,000 barrels per day, only about a tenth of India's domestic oil output of over 580,000 barrels per day. Both Pakistan and India are heavily reliant on energy imports to meet their domestic demand, and oil is among the top imports for both countries in value terms. Going by this current data, it is hard to fathom a scenario wherein Pakistan would be in any position to sell oil to India, barring a realisation of Pakistan's hope of some miraculous, fate-altering hydrocarbon discoveries. Theoretically, at least, impossible is nothing, although exploration efforts so far in Pakistan have yielded very limited success. Then what is the source of this hypothesis of Pakistan sitting on 'massive' oil reserves that Islamabad, and now Trump, appear to be proposing? The basis of this premature assessment might lie in a decade-old report. In 2015, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a report that estimated around 9.1 billion barrels of 'technically recoverable' shale oil resources in Pakistan based on available data and technical analysis, but without any exploratory effort. The same report had pegged India's technically recoverable shale oil resources at 3.8 billion barrels. These estimates, however, cannot be equated to proven reserves, which rests two rungs higher on the ladder of hydrocarbon resource recoverability. In fact, only a fraction of such technically recoverable estimates might eventually be produced, if at all, according to experts. Technically recoverable resources mean the oil and gas that can theoretically be produced based on current technology, industry practice, and geologic knowledge. A much smaller subset of these are what are known as 'economically recoverable resources', or oil and gas that could be produced without incurring a loss. Again, not all of these estimated economically recoverable resources may actually be produced due to various technical and economic considerations. A much smaller subset of these resources is what are known as proven or proved reserves—'the most certain oil and gas resource category'. 'Proved reserves are volumes of oil and natural gas that geologic and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions,' the EIA said in that 2015 report. Notably, the American agency also stated that the recoverability of shale oil was quite low—ranging from 3 per cent to 7 per cent of the oil in-place with exceptional cases being as high as 10 per cent or as low as 1 per cent. Suddenly, the 9.1-billion-barrel technically recoverable resource estimate doesn't appear as big. Also, given that all the assessments were based largely on available geological data and without any real exploratory data or exploration effort, it is anybody's guess how much shale oil production may actually be economically viable and feasible for Pakistan. While nothing can be ruled out from the realm of possibility, experts believe that it is highly improbable that Islamabad will win an oil lottery big enough to offset its own oil imports and then be left with excess volumes to export to India, the world's third-largest consumer of crude oil. A few reports of hydrocarbon discoveries have appeared in the Pakistani press over the past couple of years, but there is little data available in the public domain to back those claims made by officials in that country's establishment. And again, much of the claims are reported to have been based in surveys and studies, and without any significant exploratory effort. It is also worth noting that hydrocarbon exploration itself is an extremely expensive and long-gestation endeavour that could last multiple years, which is usually followed by another years-long development phase, before commercial production can start. For Pakistan, this would mean a significant lead time before any of its potential oil reserves can be tapped into, apart from billions of dollars' worth of investments that its fragile economy may not be able to afford. Perhaps that is where one or more of the American oil majors might come in with their deep pockets.
Time of India
32 minutes ago
- Time of India
Instant answers: India's fintechs harness GenAI
Bengaluru: Generative AI is rewriting the rules of finance, and nowhere is the upheaval sharper than in India's booming fintech scene. Brokerage chatbots that speak four languages, payment assistants that fix errors in seconds, and back-office engines that close two-hundred-million credit accounts before dawn are steadily stripping cost and friction out of money management—and propelling a new breed of startups onto the world stage. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now That momentum explains why Tiffany Bloomquist, who runs the startups business for Amazon Web Services (AWS) across Asia-Pacific and Japan, now touches down in India almost every quarter. Meeting founders in Bengaluru during a recent visit, she said GenAI has quickly become the fastest route to improving customer experience and urged entrepreneurs to weave the technology into every layer of their products. Three local tail-winds, she said, are fuelling the surge. F irst, the govet's India Stack gives developers ready-made digital rails for identity, payments and data-sharing. Second, Nasscom counts more than 240 Indian GenAI startups today, up from just 66 early last year. Third, AWS's ten-week GenAI Accelerator—supported by a $230 million fund—offers up to $1 million in credits, matches mentors and organises brisk "speed connect" meetings with big corporate buyers. Seven Indian firms have already won places on the current cohort. What, then, are those firms actually doing? Stock-broking platform Dhan, serving roughly three million traders, was drowning in know-your-customer (KYC) checks. By training a language model on its own policy documents, it now answers a quarter of those queries automatically, halving average wait times and cutting support costs by nearly a third. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Payment specialist Easebuzz faced merchants who repeatedly rang in with integration snags. Its new assistant, ERA, reads each message, compares it with technical manuals and suggests step-by-step fixes in real time. Redundant tickets have dropped by 80% and responses that once took 20 minutes arrive in seconds. At banking tech company Zeta, the numbers are bigger still. Every night the firm must post millions of transactions that merchants queue during the day. A cloud-based processing engine—reinforced with AI routines that predict the heaviest bursts—now reconciles 208 million credit accounts in about 40 minutes, a feat that would once have demanded a nine-figure hardware budget. Debt-marketplace Yubi uses large-language models to refresh credit scores. Feeding the software a lake of public filings and bank statements lets risk models update in hours rather than days, trimming a third off the time borrowers wait for funding offers. The common recipe is simple: distil company knowledge into an AI model, surface it through a chat-style interface and run it on servers that expand only when the rush arrives. "We used to automate servers," Bloomquist said. "Now we're automating compliance, advice, and trust. Founders who seize that shift will shape the next decade of finance."
