India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas has warned that there will be “organized chaos” if the price of oil goes above $100 a barrel, but said the South Asian nation is well positioned to cope with the higher costs.
“If the price goes above $100, it’s not going to be in the interest of the producing country or anyone else. You will have big, organized chaos,” Hardeep Singh Puri told CNBC’s Dan Murphy during a panel at the ADIPEC oil and gas conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on Tuesday.
But “you should not worry about the impact on India. India is a big economy with a lot of domestic production. We’ll cut back, we’ll do something or the other,” Puri said.
Last week, oil prices surged to their highest level in more than a year, with U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures hitting $95.03 a barrel. Prices have since retreated and were trading at $89.44 a barrel in Asia on Wednesday morning.
While Puri was confident that India could weather higher prices, he warned that other nations might not be able to.
“I would be worried about what happens to other parts of the developing world … that’s a really worrying point,” Puri said, stressing that rising prices over the past 18 months have pushed “100 million people into abject poverty.”
“They have had to go from cheap gas and cooking fuel [to] wet wood, coal or whatever they can get. That is the problem.”