Six days or 74 days? Decoding India’s petroleum reserve debate, in charts

India currently has three strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs)—buried in underground caverns—in Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru, and Padur. These together have a storage capacity of 5.33 million tonnes. As per Mint calculations, this can cover around 9 days of average daily consumption of 0.6 million tonnes of petroleum products in the country seen over the past five years. With 1.3 and 1.5 million tonnes of capacity, Visakhapatnam and Mangaluru can cover about 2.2 days and 2.5 days of demand, respectively, while Padur 2.5 million tonnes can cover about 4.2 days of demand. However, these reserves are only 64% full (about 3.37 million tonnes), forming the basis for the widely cited estimate of six days of coverage.