Refining Capacity Expansion : India aims to nearly double its refining capacity to 450 - 500 million tonnes per annum (MMTPA) by 2030, with several new refinery projects under way (e . g. West Coast Refinery, HPCL Rajasthan Refinery, Numaligarh Refinery expansion ) Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for Petroleum Re ning: Incentivises capacity expansion and technological upgrades in re neries to boost domestic manufacturing and exports. The Pradham Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) , including its expanded Ujjwala 2.0 phase, aims to provide clean cooking fuel by o ering subsidised LPG connections to economically weaker households across India.
Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) and its Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) : Policies to boost domestic production with revenue sharing and year-round bidding, including 25 new blocks in OALP’s 10th round. Oil elds (Regulation and Development) Amendment Act, 2025 : Modernises regulations to attract investment with investor-friendly clauses and streamlined lease renewals. Draft Petroleum & Natural Gas Rules, 2025 : Supports interation of renewables, mandates emissions monitoring and establishes carbon capture frameworks. National Seismic Programme Expansion : Enhances exploration using advanced technologies and AI-driven seismic data analysis.
Figure 2 Driving growth: India’s energy policy priorities for 2025.
Source: PIB, DGH, MoPNG
solutions that could unlock greater efficiency and productivity. The reasoning above also partly explains why continuous process industrial players, including those in oil and gas, have been very slow to implement AI. Complex processes depend on physical relationships across a wide range of variables, making modelling and improvement through analytics challenging. Additionally, data is often scarce, siloed, or of low quality because it resides in disparate IT-OT systems related to individual equipment rather than being integrated across the entire process. Hence, many organisations must rely on experienced operators’ intuition to manage changing conditions. This convergence of technical, operational, and organisational barriers has historically locked the refinery and petrochemical operations into incremental improvements rather than a transformative change. AI-driven transformation of refinery and petrochemical operations These historical constraints are no longer insurmountable. Where traditional approaches have struggled with fragmented data and manual optimisation, modern AI platforms – combining hybrid intelligence, advanced analytics, and deep process expertise – can potentially overcome these long-standing constraints, enabling continuous, intelligent improvement across refinery operations. Additionally, the continuous nature of refinery operations makes them prime candidates for
improvement through analytics. Scientific relationships between process inputs and outcomes guarantee that targeted interventions can be quantified and tracked over time. Unlike batch processes, continuous processes enable ongoing modelling, rapid testing, and refinement. AI can reshape refinery operations by replacing rigid, rule- based control systems with continuous, intelligent, and self-optimising frameworks that adapt dynamically to changing process conditions. Through the integration of “ Through the integration of advanced ML, optimisation algorithms, and real-time sensor data, refining and petrochemical operations can now drive improvements in throughput, yield, and energy efficiency ” advanced machine learning (ML), optimisation algorithms, and real-time sensor data, refining and petrochemical operations can now drive improvements in throughput, yield, and energy efficiency while strengthening asset reliability and safety performance. The rise of Industry 4.0 and embedded sensors generates vast streams of data, enabling real- time optimisation with the power of cloud computing. In this regard, AI can effectively handle a multitude of variables and their interdependencies, and arrive at optimal models in much less time. Agentic AI – where individual
Refining India
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