India Energy Week 2024: Minister Puri highlights tech innovations, biofuel story

The India Energy Week 2024 in Goa ends today, and speaking to the media yesterday, Hardeep Singh Puri, Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Housing and Urban Affairs, commended the tech innovations showcased at the four-day event.

Hardeep Singh Puri speaks to the media at IEW 2024
Hardeep Singh Puri, Indian Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs, at a media interaction at IEW 2024. Photo: PIB

Interacting with the media on the sidelines of IEW 2024, the minister highlighted some of the innovations, such as ‘Tamper-Proof’ cooking gas cylinder with QR code and diesel engine manufactured for the US market.

About India’s advancements in the energy sector, Puri said, “The biofuel story resonates very strongly in the exhibits showcased here. One area I was very impressed with is making sustainable aviation fuel from cooking oil and vegetable oils.”

He also said that India had achieved 12 per cent ethanol blending with petrol five months ahead of the estimated target, and this had led the government to revise the target of 20 per cent ethanol blending by five years to 2025.

“The next generation [of fuel] will be electric and ethanol,” he said.

Separately, Puri announced that Goa had become a kerosene-free state. “I want to congratulate the government of Goa that they have got mukti (freedom) from kerosene rules,” he said.

Quoting the International Energy Agency report released at IEW 2024, Puri said that the report findings that India would overtake China “to assume the position of the world’s largest source of oil demand growth is very important”.