‘Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited’ is owned by which organization?

Concept

India's petroleum sector is organised around two very different kinds of institution. A commercial public sector company — upstream (exploration and production) or downstream (refining, pipelines and marketing) — is a registered company that produces or sells hydrocarbons for revenue. A statutory board created by an Act of Parliament is not a trading company at all: it is funded by a statutory levy on the industry and channels that money into developing the sector. A strategic reserve is a national energy-security asset rather than commercial stock, so it is held in a dedicated special purpose vehicle (SPV) owned by the sector's statutory development body, which keeps the reserve off any operating company's commercial balance sheet.

Application

Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited (ISPRL) is exactly such a special purpose vehicle. It was incorporated in 2004 to build and manage India's underground crude oil storage, and Phase I created 5.33 million metric tonnes of capacity in rock caverns at Visakhapatnam (1.33 MMT), Mangaluru (1.5 MMT) and Padur (2.5 MMT). ISPRL is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oil Industry Development Board (OIDB), the statutory body constituted under the Oil Industry (Development) Act, 1974, and it works under the administrative control of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

Contrast

Cross-check and result

A useful cross-check is ISPRL's own corporate history: it began as a subsidiary of Indian Oil Corporation Limited and, with effect from 9 May 2006, became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oil Industry Development Board — the position recorded in ISPRL's annual reports and in Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas releases, and therefore the position when this 2023 paper was set. Ownership of Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited thus vests with the Oil Industry Development Board.