Move ensures uninterrupted urea supply to Indian market Govt not to drag Gulf nation to International Tribunal

The government has accepted the proposal seeking hike in prices of gas supplied by Oman to an Indian fertiliser plant in the Gulf nation to $1.5 per mmBtu for this year, a move that will ensure uninterrupted supply of urea to the Indian market.

New Delhi Oman has halved the price at which it will sell natural gas to an Indian fertiliser plant in the Gulf nation to $1.5 per mmBtu but has added an annual escalation clause.

Oman, which had previously proposed to raise rates of gas sold to OMIFCO’s urea manufacturing facility at Sur to $3 per million instead of present price of $0.77 per mmBtu, has revised its offer to charge $1.5 per mmBtu, sources in know of the development said.

The Union Cabinet will soon take a call on the vexed issue of whether to go for international arbitration at a London tribunal against Oman, which raised natural gas price from 77 cents to $3 per unit, leading to a sharp rise in the price of fertiliser imported by India under a long-term off-take agreement.

The finance ministry has rejected a request for increasing the price of urea imported from Omifco, an equal joint venture of Indian and Oman firms, in line with the higher gas price implemented by the Arab nation at the beginning of this year.

New Delhi: A billion-dollar venture of public sector cooperatives Iffco and Kribhco in Oman is in jeopardy as Muscat has trebled the price of gas it supplies to India’s only overseas fertilizer plant ahead of schedule. Government officials told TOI that Oman has asked Omifco—Iffco and Kribhco’s joint venture with Oman Oil Company—to pay $3 for each unit of gas against 77 cents it pays now. The Omani move will also push up the government’s annual fertilizer subsidy by Rs 500 crore since the cost of fertilizer sourced from the plant will rise by $60 per tonne, government sources said.

Talk of a Middle Eastern green energy boom is likely to prove no more than a mirage with little hope of the region saving clean technology companies from the shrinking project pools of Europe.

Instead India, China and Latin America offer some hope for green energy companies struggling in a European market drowning in debt and a North American market awash with gas.

At least nine people in Oman were killed and 200 injured after a tropical storm swept through the Arabian Peninsula state, causing at least $50 million-worth of damage, officials said on Thursday.

The storm, which began on Tuesday, flooded many parts of the country, prompting 60 patients to be evacuated from two hospitals by government helicopters.

‘Nine died in the storm and about 200 were injured. In some parts of the country, the water level was six feet high,’ a rescue services spokesman said.

The two hospitals had to be closed.

The ambitious $10-billion project to connect Gulf nations through a modern rail network, stretching over 2,000 km, is expected to become operational by 2018, with authorities working to ensure that construction starts on it by 2014.

Authorities across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) want the project to provide cost-effective means to transport goods and services in the region and plans are also afoot to ultimately link the railway network to Yemen via Muscat.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are set to spend around $54 billion in the near future to increase the capacity of their electricity networks by 32,000 MW, a new report has said.

The report issued by the Kuwait Financial Centre (Markaz) indicates that the GCC states — namely Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain — have taken some giant steps towards developing their electrical power networks, noting that an increase in the Gulf countries’ population and consumption levels played an integral part in creating the demand for these increases.

Over two dozen countries, including Pakistan, will take part next week in a full-scale test of the Indian Ocean`s tsunami alert system, using the 2004 Sumatra quake as the basis for the exercise, Unesco said on Thursday.

Exercise IOWAVE 11 will re-enact the seismic events of Dec 26, 2004, simulating a 9.2-magnitude quake that occurs northwest of Sumatra, sending waves across the Indian Ocean that strike the coast of South Africa 12 hours later.