I initially resisted the offer of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas when the UPA government was formed in May 2004 because I considered MoPNG a notorious den of bribery against patronage to undeserving second-rate politicians and their clients. But, when I was overruled and given “temporary” charge of the ministry, I was pleasantly surprised to discover through briefings by senior officers and public-sector oil honchos that the ministry had, in fact, a key role to play in “energy security” to complement, on an equal footing, the external affairs ministry’s responsibility for “geopolitical security” and the finance/commerce ministries’ responsibility for “economic security”, which together with MoPNG, add up to “national security”.

At that time, two decades ago, our dependency on oil and gas imports was about 70 per cent of our requirements. It is now nearer 90 per cent. Deeply impressed by economist Vijay Kelkar’s comment that natural gas would be to the 21st century what petroleum had been in the 20th and coal in the 19th and wood till the 18th, I focused my energies, and those of the ministry and its subordinate bodies, in particular the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH), as well as the public-sector oil companies, on the critical issue of “energy security”.

This required a two-track approach: Domestic and external. On the domestic track, we had to build a global network of research institutions that would provide the technology to drill through the lava and volcanic rock-laden “Deccan trap” to get to our own domestic on-shore reserves, which were at a........

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