The ceiling price that Reliance Industries and its partner BP Plc, as well as operators, can charge for the natural gas they produce from deepsea and difficult fields has been cut by 3 per cent to USD 9.72 per MMBtu for six months starting October 1, an official order said.
Rates for gas from legacy fields, however, remain unchanged at USD 6.75 per million British thermal unit.
Two different formulas govern rates paid for gas produced from legacy or old fields of national oil companies like ONGC and OIL, and for newer fields lying in difficult-to-tap areas like deepsea.
While the price for legacy fields is fixed on a monthly basis, the ceiling rates for difficult fields are set biannually - on April 1 and October 1.
For the period October 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026, the "gas being produced from discoveries in deepwater, ultra deepwater and high pressure - high temperature (HPHT) areas, the gas price ceiling is notified as USD 9.72 per million British thermal unit on gross calorific value (GCV) basis," Oil Ministry's Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC) said in an order.
The rate for April 1, 2025, to September 30, 2025, was USD 10.04 per mmBtu.
The price of natural gas produced from old legacy fields called APM - the key input used to make CNG and produce electricity and product fertiliser - remains unchanged at USD 6.75 per MMBtu, according to a separate PPAC order APM gas is produced by state-owned firms Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and Oil India Ltd (OIL) from fields that were given to them on a nomination basis. This gas is the input that is used in the cooking gas piped to household kitchens, as well as turned into CNG for running automobiles, making fertilisers and producing electricity.
PPAC said the APM gas price for October 1 to October 31, 2025, should have been USD 6.96 per MMBtu, going by the 10 per cent indexation to the crude oil price. But the APM rate is subject to a ceiling and floor - ceiling of USD 6.75 and floor of USD 4.
And so, the APM gas price for October will be USD 6.75.
APM gas is provided to city gas distributors for supply to CNG and residential PNG segments, which together account for 60 per cent of their sales volume.
