By R. Sasankan 

A froth of excitement has started to bubble once again in India's petroleum industry after a cryptic comment by Petroleum Minister Hardeep Puri sparked speculation among the cognoscenti about the likelihood of a major oil find off the Andamans coast.

In a statement made in parliament Puri said India was tantalisingly close to making a discovery of a Guyana-scale oilfield in the Andamans Sea.

Guyana's destiny changed in 2015 after US fossil fuel giant Exxon discovered nearly 11 billion barrels of oil in the deep water off the coast of this tiny country. It was one of the most spectacular oil discoveries in recent decades.

By 2019, Exxon and its partners, US oil company Hess and China-headquartered CNOOC, started producing fossil fuel. They now pump around 650,000 barrels of oil a day, with plans to more than double this to 1.3 million by 2027. Guyana is projected to record the world's highest expected oil production growth through 2035.

So any comparison with Guyana's oil discovery cannot be taken lightly. However, sceptics abound and many will undoubtedly wait for details to emerge from a variety of extensive tests to confirm proven and probable reserves.

But Puri's statement awoke in me memories of a similar development in the early 1980s when Time magazine carried an article that confidently predicted that India's Godavari offshore on the East coast was floating on oil. The premise rested on some dodgy conjectures but the article had a tremendous impact on the Indian psyche.

The forecast was made at a time when the Congress government under Mrs Indira Gandhi was battling an unprecedented foreign exchange crisis that had forced the country to seek a loan of $ 5.8 billion from the IMF to deal with the fallout of a tripling of crude oil prices. The government was grilled by the opposition on the floor of parliament about the IMF loan conditionalities.

While replying to a debate on the issue in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, the then finance minister R. Venkataraman famously said the government could pre-pay the IMF loan "if the Godavari blesses us". The Time magazine article - which did not quote any reputed geologist or oil pundit - became the government's defence against the opposition's barbs.

Since then, ONGC and several other companies have drilled quite a few wells in the Godavari basin in search of the elusive oil. There has been no significant discovery so far. Just as in a couple of other basins, there were a few small discoveries and only one went on to be commercially exploited.

So what makes Puri's assertion more believable than Venkataraman's? Puri is basically a diplomat and not a politician by training. He must have been adequately briefed by experts. By comparing the promised field to Guyana-type, the minister Puri is hinting at a major oil find in the Andamans.

In recent years, the Andaman Basin has emerged as key frontier in India's energy exploration. Geologically, the A&N basin lies at the intersection of the Andaman and Nicobar Basins, part of the Bengal-Arakan sedimentary system. The tectonic setting at the boundary of the Indian and Burmese plates has created numerous stratigraphic traps that are conducive for hydrocarbon accumulation. A stratigraphic trap is a geological formation that traps hydrocarbons (oil and gas) due to variations in rock layers, such as changes in permeability or the shape of the rock formation itself.

The basin's geological promise is further amplified by its proximity to proven petroleum systems in Myanmar and North Sumatra. According to petroleum ministry officials, global interest in the A&N basin has been rekindled following significant gas discoveries in South Andaman offshore Indonesia, highlighting geological continuity across this region.

If Mr Puri turns out to be factually correct in his statement, the Indian economy - already the fourth largest in the world with a nominal GDP of $ 4.19 trillion - could receive a significant boost. India's oil import dependency is currently around 88 per cent of the domestic demand. It is projected to rise to 90 per cent in the next two years. Fortunately for India, crude prices have been going down and are unlikely to move up in the immediate future. But there is no reason to believe that it will all be smooth sailing from hereon.

A Guyana-scale discovery in the Andamans has the potential to propel India to the third spot in global ranking for world economies behind the US and China. But if Mr Puri's forecast turns into a damp squib, there will be a lot of red faces in the Narendra Modi-led government.

India's relations with President Donald Trump has turned tense in recent weeks, especially after the rumpus over America's tariff tantrums. Trump slapped a 25 per cent levy on goods imported from India while imposing only 19 per cent on neighbouring Pakistan. The US president claimed that he had intervened to broker a ceasefire between the warring South Asian nations in May - a claim that been strongly rebutted by the Modi government. The US has since arrived at a deal with Pakistan to exploit what has been described as a major oil discovery in Balochistan. A bellicose Trump recently heaped scorn on India by describing it as a "dead economy" because it continued to violate western sanctions to import crude oil from Russia. He has vowed heft penalties if India continues to do so. In a snide remark, he also said that he could visualise a scenario where Pakistan could sell its crude oil to India. The Modi government has bristled at the continued slights but has refrained from making a belligerent reply. A gusher in the Andamans could be its bet to silence the whimsical man in the White House.