In today’s Finshots, we talk about India’s plan to build a gas pipeline to Oman.

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Now onto today’s story.

The Story

If you’ve been following the news or simply paid for a gas cylinder recently, you already know where energy crises eventually show up: your wallet.

And most of us don’t think about it much. We pay a little more for a gas cylinder, cook dinner and move on.

But somewhere between the Gulf and your kitchen sits one of the most important shipping routes in the world: the Strait of Hormuz.

A huge share of the world’s oil and gas trade passes through this narrow stretch of water.

And India in particular is more exposed than most countries. We import most of our crude oil needs and increasingly rely on imported natural gas too. Much of that energy reaches India through shipping routes connected to Hormuz.

Which is why India is now exploring an unusual solution: a ₹40,000 crore subsea pipeline project to bring gas directly from the Gulf.

It sounds almost too good to be true and that’s the appeal of pipelines.

Unlike tankers, pipelines move fuel continuously. They don’t wait for shipping schedules or sit in congested ports. And once built, they can often become cheaper and more predictable over long periods.

At first, this feels obvious. Build a pipe and so you can reduce dependence on tankers.

Except pipelines solve one problem, while creating another.

Because the moment energy starts flowing through a fixed route, geography stops being the only concern and politics enters the room.

Let’s take a step back and think about what a pipeline actually is.

It's not just steel and welding running through the ground or seabed. It's a decades-long commitment between countries. While a tanker can change course, switch suppliers, reroute around a conflict, dock somewhere else entirely, a pipeline cannot. Once it's in the ground or on the seabed, the relationship has to hold for as long as the infrastructure does.

And that's usually decades. That's exactly where India has kept running into walls.

For decades, India has looked at ways of bringing energy directly by pipeline.

The most famous example was the proposed Iran–Pakistan–India gas pipeline project.

Had this project gone through fully, Iranian gas would travel overland through Pakistan and into India, creating a long-term energy corridor.

For years, negotiations moved forward. And then reality showed up.

The project had been around for years. Iran and Pakistan first began discussions and India joined later, signing a preliminary agreement with Iran in 1999, and by the mid-2000s it had picked up as all three countries explored what became known as the Peace Pipeline.

But the closer the project got to becoming real, the more difficult the politics became.

India worried about depending on infrastructure that would run through Pakistan for decades and debated how transit charges would be set. Then global politics entered the equation.  After the 2008 India–US civil nuclear agreement, pressure and sanctions around Iran intensified. By 2009, India stepped away from the project.

But India didn’t stop believing in pipelines after the Iran project stalled.

It tried again, except this time the route moved north.

In the early 2000s, India joined discussions around the proposed Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Pipeline (TAPI). The idea was unique: bring natural gas from Turkmenistan’s giant Galkynysh gas field through Afghanistan and Pakistan into India.

And for a while, it looked real. The four countries signed an agreement in 2010. Construction was formally launched in 2015 with a goal to start gas flows within a few years.

But then the route itself became the problem.

Nearly 800 kilometres of the pipeline would pass through Afghanistan, including regions that spent years dealing with conflict. Again Pakistan–India relations were uncertain. Even today, parts of the project are discussed and built in stages, but the original vision of Turkmen gas reaching Indian homes remains… a pipe dream (pun intended).

And that’s when the pattern becomes hard to ignore:

The pipelines kept colliding with politics. Which is why the new Oman proposal feels different.

Because instead of asking countries to stay aligned for decades, it asks whether the sea can do a better job than land.

At least on paper, this project has already moved a step further than many of its predecessors. It’s called the Middle East–India Deepwater Pipeline (MEIDP).

And for the first time, it has something the past proposals never quite managed: actual groundwork.

A private group called South Asia Gas Enterprise has already spent years studying the route and carrying out surveys to understand what the seabed actually looks like. That's not the kind of thing you do just to keep a proposal alive. Seabed surveys cost money and take time.

The plan is to run nearly 2,000 kilometres of pipeline from Oman's coast to Gujarat — sitting as deep as 3.5  kilometres below the surface of the Arabian Sea. At full capacity, it would carry around 31 million cubic metres of natural gas per day. GAIL, Engineers India and Indian Oil Corporation are expected to lead the feasibility work, with the petroleum ministry estimating the whole thing could be done in five to seven years if approvals come through.

And Oman is just the entry point.

The long term vision is for the pipeline to eventually tap into the Gulf gas network — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkmenistan, and even Iran. The pipe, in other words, isn't just a connection to one supplier. It could be a door into the largest concentration of gas reserves on earth.

Right now, India needs that door.

We consume somewhere around 190 million cubic metres of gas every day. By 2030, that number is expected to climb to 365 million cubic metres. And unlike crude oil, where India holds at least some strategic reserves, there is almost no buffer for gas. When prices spiked this year, there was nothing to draw on. The market moved, and India moved with it, whether it wanted to or not.

Of course, building a pipeline like this comes with its own set of challenges. 

For starters, the depth. Parts of the route could reach depths of roughly 3.5 kilometres below sea level, which would make it one of the deepest subsea gas pipelines attempted anywhere in the world.

At those depths, the surrounding pressure becomes enormous. Pipelines can’t just be made longer. They need thicker walls, more specialised welding, stronger coatings and installation methods that work thousands of metres underwater.

And laying the pipe is only half the problem.

Because once it’s so deep under the ocean… how do you maintain it?

A leak in a land pipeline might mean sending crews and equipment.

A leak 3.5 kilometres underwater means specialised vessels, remotely operated systems and potentially weeks or months before repairs even begin. Even inspection becomes expensive.

The biggest issue, though, is Iran. As we mentioned earlier, using this route to import Iranian gas is part of the long-term plan. And the US knows that. But if India ever attempts that, it could trigger sanctions, since the US can penalise companies or countries doing business with Iran; unless, of course, a US-Iran peace deal eventually works out.

In fact, just last month, the US revoked the sanctions waiver for India’s work on the Chabahar Port project in Iran, which gave India access to Central Asian markets.

So there’s a real chance something similar could happen to the MEIDP in the future. And that wouldn’t just affect the gas flowing through the pipeline but could also put the entire infrastructure investment at risk, even years after it’s built.

For now, the MEIDP pipeline remains a proposal. It may move ahead and we could see it become a reality in five to seven years. Or it may join the long list of energy projects that never materialised. But even exploring a project like this tells you that India isn’t trying to escape geography anymore. Rather, it’s trying to stop every energy shock from ending up in your wallet.

Until next time…

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