The Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas & Skill Development & Entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan today launched an online portal for enabling easy, efficient and transparent booking of Common carrier capacity for natural gas transmission services under GAIL’s pipelines. It would be a first step to facilitate gas trading on hub or exchange traded platform in India.Launching the portal, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan said that the portal is a transparent, market-friendly component in the gas trading system. He said that the policy reforms in last 4 years have helped in increasing the production and import of gas multi-fold in the country. The Government is focusing on the clean fuel, and for this purpose the gas import contracts have been renegotiated, bio-CNG is being promoted, and PNG supplies will soon reach new Geographical Areas. Gas is a price sensitive commodity and its marketing in a transparent manner is essential.
The portal should enable the new entities to utilize the GAIL’s infrastructure in procuring the gas in a cost-effective manner. The Minister said that the portal will act as a milestone in expansion of gas marketing, without human interface, through digital means.The online portal www.gailonline,com is the first of its kind in the natural gas sector of the country, to provide gas consumers the facility to register pipeline capacity bookings online and endeavours to continue the practice of serving on first come-first served basis.Speaking on the occasion, the GAIL CMD Shri B.C.Tripathi said that with this online initiative, GAIL has raised the standards of consumer experience for third-party access to natural gas pipelines to consumers in India. He said that the company has been providing third party access to pipelines since 2004 and over 100 consumers, small and big, are routinely being serviced at any time, for the last few years.