New Delhi [India], February 14 : In agreement with petroleum minister Hardeep Puri's observation that the "Trump presidency is good news for oil", Vandana Hari of Singapore-based Vanda Insights asserted that the year 2025 will be calmer for the oil sector.
Vanda Insights is a Singapore-based provider of intelligence on the global energy markets, launched in September 2016.
The two big geopolitical issues over the past few years, which have caused a lot of volatility in crude and caused spikes in crude prices, have been the two wars, the Gaza War and the Ukraine War, she argued, talking to ANI at India Energy Week 2025.
"Broadly, when I look into 2025, I do expect that this Gaza and Ukraine situation will cool down a little bit," Vandana Hari, Founder and CEO of Vanda Insights said, being hopeful that the Trump presidency would be able to broker some sort of peace deal.
On the Gaza War front, the ceasefire agreement is in place.
"The Ukraine War, it looks like Trump is going to sign some sort of a peace agreement (with) Zelensky very soon as well," she hoped.
In case Russia-Ukraine peace sees the light of the day, Vandana Hari believes it "should take a lot of the geopolitical risk premium away," hinting at crude oil prices.
"Then it basically boils down to what is the supply-demand balance going to look like in this year," she said.
Again quoting minister Puri, who had said "there's plenty of oil" in the market to meet the demand, she said she expects prices to be a "little bit cooler" this year.
Vanda Insights sees Brent crude prices falling to about USD 70 to USD 75 a barrel on average in 2025. At this point, Brent is trading at a little over USD 75 per barrel.
"We are seeing that generally the expectations for this year is that there'll be more supply coming into the market, even with OPEC non-OPEC restraining output, there'll be more supply than the demand growth," she said.
India depends on imports for over 80 per cent of its crude oil requirement. Various steps have been taken by the government to increase the production of domestic crude oil and bring down imports. US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Iraq are among the big suppliers of crude to India.
Talking about PM Modi and President Trump talks on energy trade, she said she sees it "as a very broad scope agreement."
"We do know that Modi had gone to the US very well aware of the threat of Trump's tariffs, especially reciprocal tariffs against India... And we do know that India has a considerable trade deficit with the US," she said.
India is a major importer of energy from US.
She said it would be worth seeing how the energy imports into India from the US increase.
"So under that very broad agreement that India will buy more crude and LNG. I would say let's wait and see how it actually pans out at the execution level because this was a sort of a I would call it more an understanding between the two heads of government rather than a deal as such, because now it will come back to the Indian Oil Ministry, to the executives of the refiners, for instance, on how much they can actually practically buy," she said.
India is a price-sensitive buyer and buying from the US may cost more for India given because of the long distance freight cost. In the past three years or so, India has been increasingly sourcing crude oil from Russia, at discounted rates.
"Why has Russian oil share gone up from nearly 0 to 40 per cent because it's been discounted, right? When energy supplies are coming from the US, you have to bear in mind that there is a huge freight cost involved as well," she supplemented.
Can one expect India to bargain on crude from US?
Vandana Hari put forward a possible scenario. She asked whether India can go to Trump and propose imports at discounted rates?
"What it will boil down to is that at the Prime Minister's level, for instance, they'll have to weigh the pros and cons. If we buy more US LNG and crude, even if it is more expensive relatively, but then if it saves us reciprocal tariffs from the US, where do we have a better bargain?" she asked.