By R. Sasankan 

There was a time - almost a decade ago - when the American giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron dominated the rankings in the petroleum industry. Not anymore. The two American duo have been toppled from their perch by the Chinese behemoths like China National Petroleum and Sinopec.

But by 2025, Saudi Aramco has emerged out of the blue and clambered to the fourth spot in the Fortune 500 Global 500 rankings - emerging as the world's top petroleum giant on the leaderboard, ahead of the Chinese twins.

Big is Beautiful: it gives you heft and enormous power and influence over a volatile world that is being increasingly rocked by geo-political crises.

The Indian petroleum giants have barely made into the top 100: Reliance Industries (at the 88th spot) and Indian Oil Corporation at 127. What is more worrying is that China National Petroleum has revenues of $ 412 billion - more than 4.5 times Reliance's $ 114 billion.

The question that India's policymakers need to confront is this: should we, as the world's fourth largest economy, aspire to have corporations that rank among the largest in the world?

The short answer to that is yes. Large corporations can hope to call the shots, influence markets and prices. Most importantly, they cannot be bullied into submission or edged out of negotiations on issues that can affect sovereign interests.

Reliance Industries is the largest Indian corporation on the Global Fortune 500 list but it isn't merely a petroleum giant. The biggest chunk of its FY2025 consolidated revenues of $ 125.3 billion in revenues (Rs 10711.74 billion) comes from the oils-to-chemicals business: $ 73.4 billion, or 58.6 per cent, with another $ 2.5 billion from its E&P operations. The rest comes from its interests in retail, telecom, and media and entertainment. Note: there is a slight difference in the revenue figures put out by Reliance Industries for FY2025 and those given in the Global Fortune 500 study.

The state-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) with revenues of over $ 90 billion is the bigger petroleum player because it operates exclusively in the energy sector. But is it big enough? Should not aim to leap into the big league of top 100 global corporations?

There is a reason why I have opted to focus on the issue of size and scale of our petroleum industry players in this column.

On Friday, October 3rd, our daily IOG Exclusive column carried a report listing India's annual domestic crude production since FY 2019-20 and its percentage share in the petroleum products. Crude production in FY 25 stood at 24.25 million metric tonnes, which accounted for a share of 12.3 per cent in the petroleum products consumed and exported.

India's crude oil import dependency which has been consistently rising reached a record 90% in April 2025 and 88.2% for FY 2024-25.

India is acknowledged to be a fast growing economy in the world. To sustain the growth India needs oil and gas in large quantities. With domestic production failing to rise, the only option is to import.

The country's energy planers realised the problem very long ago. But it now appears that they were either not imaginative enough to be able to draw up the right strategy for the country or were constrained by the lack of financial resources.

India's sedimentary basins do not possess prolific hydrocarbon reserves. So, the right policy should have been to acquire oil and gas assets overseas. True, India made some efforts in that direction by setting up an entity called ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) - the overseas subsidiary of the upstream giant ONGC - and then got other state-owned oil companies such as IOC, BPCL, HPCL, OIL and GAIL to acquire assets abroad as well. The problem was that this was not a concerted strategy guided by the political leadership and, therefore, the outcomes were less than optimal.

India's state-owned companies have oil and gas assets in as many as 21 countries with their investments spanning across Africa, South America, the Middle East, and CIS Nations with key players like ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) operating in 15 countries.

The truth is that such a piecemeal approach meant that we were looking for peanuts - which stunted our ambitions and resulted in very mediocre outcomes. In FY25, India's total production share in these acquired oil and gas overseas assets amounted to just 20 Mtoe (million tonnes of oil equivalent). This is ridiculously low for a country that ranks as the world's third largest importer of crude oil and the fourth largest importer of LNG.

On the domestic front, we have been unable to find a significant oil and gas discovery for many years now. Recent reports suggest there could be a major gas discovery by Oil India Ltd in the Andaman waters. It is still too early to determine how big this reserve will be. But any discovery will count as a highly welcome development in an oil- and gas-starved country.

India needs to focus on energy security. Since it has a massive energy requirement, it must draw up a large and ambitious policy to acquire oil assets overseas. Even though it has a footprint in 21 countries, India is not designated as an operator of any of the oil and gas project anywhere. That needs to change quickly. This will happen only when it has a significant equity stake in these projects.

I believe that India's policy makers must now think of establishing a new corporate entity formed as a joint venture of all the state-owned oil and gas companies which will collectively hold all their existing overseas assets. An oil monolith will have the heft to make its own demands and command respect in the international oil market as one of the biggest buyers of crude oil and gas.

As a first step, an expert committee working under the aegis of the ministry of petroleum and gas can decide the stake that each state-owned oil company will hold in this joint venture. The government should also back it with adequate financial resources so that the entity can emerge as a major force in the world of petroleum. The new Indian titan should be headed by people who are regarded as genuine experts in the field with great personal integrity. Only then will it be able to negotiate large deals in the interests of the country rather than their own.

This entity must focus on acquiring mid-sized oil and gas fields overseas. The Indian market is highly price sensitive. The idea should be to ensure that we gain access to oil and gas at an affordable price. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already articulated the ambition to become the third largest economy in the world by 2030. Energy security is the mantra that is essential to fulfil that goal. The time to act is now.