Indian Oil Corp (IOC), the nation's biggest oil firm, has tied up imports from the US and taken additional volumes from Saudi Arabia to make up for the bulk of the volumes lost because of sanctions prohibiting buying oil from Iran, top officials said Friday.
Iran supplied more than a tenth of India's oil needs before the reimposition of US sanctions against the Persian Gulf nation stopped supplies this month.
"We have tied up supplies from alternate sources. No single country can make up for the volumes lost, that's why we are keeping our sourcing diversified. We are fairly diversified in our sourcing and we have robust sourcing in place to make up for all of the Iranian oil," IOC Chairman Sanjiv Singh told reporters here.
India bought close to 24 million tonnes of crude oil from Iran in the fiscal ended March 31 (2018-19). Of this, IOC sourced about 9 million tonnes from Iran.
IOC and other Indian refiners stopped importing crude oil from Iran this month following the US' move to end sanction waivers.
To make up for the shortfall, IOC has used optional volumes available from suppliers such as Saudi Arabia. Also, it has for the first time signed term import contracts with two US suppliers, he said, adding in all 4.6 million tonnes of crude oil from the US has been signed up for 2019.
IOC Director (Finance) A K Sharma said the company has an annual contract to buy 5.6 million tonnes of crude oil from Saudi Arabia. On top of this, it has the option to import an additional 2 million tonnes.
"We have exercised our optional volumes with Saudi Arabia and will be importing 2 million barrels of additional crude oil from Saudi Arabia in six months period beginning July," he said, adding the optional volumes imported from July to December total to about 1.5-1.6 million tonnes.
From the US, IOC has signed a deal with Norwegian oil company Equinor for buying 3 million tonnes of crude during the year and an additional 1.6 million tonnes from Algerian national oil company Sonatrach.
Equinor and Sonatrach produce crude oil in the US.
Singh said refiners import crude oil from a wide range of sources and have been lining up alternate supplies for the past months.