India’s GAIL India Limited (GAIL), the country’s largest natural gas marketer and infrastructure provider, has initiated talks with leading domestic steel companies, Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) and Tata Steel, on a switch to natural gas at their steel mills from oil and coal, a company official said on Thursday, February 20.
GAIL will offer complete solutions to switch to cleaner energy requirements of steel companies from more polluting coal and oil, in line with the Indian government’s commitment towards increasing use of cleaner fuels and increasing the share of natural gas in the country’s total energy mix to 15 percent by 2030, up from six percent at present, the official said.
It has been estimated that to increase the natural gas share in the total energy mix of the country to 15 percent would entail increasing daily domestic natural gas consumption to 450 million metric standard cubic meters per day (mmscmd), up from 150 million mmscmd at present. If the domestic steel industry were to switch to cleaner fuel like natural gas, the industry could be expected to account for almost 25 percent of the incremental demand of natural gas, the official added.