OREANDA-NEWS. February 21, 2011. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday said appropriate utilisation of technology in oil exploration and refinery will be of great importance for the country in the coming years. “It is well known that oil and gas will continue to provide the major portion of our energy requirement. Hence, appropriate utilisation of advanced oil and gas exploration and production technology, modern refining technology and efficient distribution of petroleum products in the country will be of great importance in the coming years,” he said.

Laying the foundation stone of the country’s second Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology (RGIPT) here, he said the Centre has undertaken studies for assessing shale gas potential in the country, including in the North East region where hydro carbon discoveries have been made in four wells.

“Many areas in the region are being assessed for shale (an organic-rich fine-grained sedimentary rock) gas resource mapping and it is in this background that the establishment of this institute in Assam will be beneficial,” he said. The NE region is greatly endowed with hydrocarbon and during the last fiscal year contributed around 15 per cent of the country’s crude oil and produced 3.38 billion cubic metre of natural gas.

“In eight rounds of the New Exploration Licencing policy, 25 exploration blocks covering 42,000 sq km have been awarded so far to the North East states and of these 50 are in Assam,” he said. The Prime Minister said RGIPT would be of world class standard and will produce technical personnel serving as leaders and innovators in the fields of petroleum technology, engineering and management.

“Since the few existing institutes are not in a position to meet this increasing requirement of technical manpower, the proposed RGIPT is intended to reduce this gap between demand and supply in the future,” he said. Singh said it was only befitting that the institute is named after former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi as “his contribution to modernisation and development of our country is immense and he believed that application of science and technology was crucial to our development processes,” he said.

Singh said his government was committed to developing the North East region, including Assam, whose long cherished dream of the gas cracker project became a reality with its foundation laid by him in April 2007 in Dibrugarh”.

“The Centre will make more than Rs 5,500 crore investment in this project. Every effort is made to see the project is commissioned by the next year and once completed, it will help a large number of downstream industries in the plastics and petrochemical sector, thereby creating a substantial number of jobs for the local uth,” he said.

The RGIPT, which will start its first academic session from September, will help the local youth to gain the knowledge and skill to exploit opportunities created by new projects like the gas cracker project, he said. The institute will offer programmes at the certificate, diploma and degree levels in various areas of specialisation in the petroleum sector and those trained by it was capable of serving as leaders and innovators covering the entire hydrocarbon value chain, Singh said.

Speaking on the occasion, Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas S Jaipal Reddy said RGIPT has been accorded high degree of autonomy to attain world class academic excellence. RGIPT, whose main campus is in Rae Bareilly, has been accorded high degree of autonomy in terms of its academic, administrative, financial functioning and legal empowerment to grant degrees, titles and academic distinctions like the IITs & IIMs, he said.

The institute is the first of its kind promoted by oil majors - ONGC, IOCL, OIL, GAIL, HPCL, BPCL and NRL- and Oil Industry Development Board (OIDB) under the aegis of Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas. The Assam centre of RGIPT envisages catering to the requirements of the oil, gas and petrochemical industry by offering curriculum that would bring about capacity building and competency enhancement in these areas.

The capital cost of this centre is estimated at Rs 143 crore and its funding will be entirely through contributions from PSU oil companies and OIDB. The recurring expenditure for the functioning of the institute will be met through the corpus fund of Rs 182 crore contributed by the promoting oil companies, official sources said.