The short version. "Vision 2030: Natural Gas Infrastructure in India," an industry-group report submitted to PNGRB in 2013, projected India's "realistic" gas demand would grow from 242.7 MMSCMD in 2012-13 to 746 MMSCMD by 2029-30, with gas reaching a 20% share of the country's primary energy mix. On the report's own trajectory, 2023-24 demand should have already reached 571 MMSCMD. Actual Indian gas consumption that year, per PPAC data reported in trade press, was around 188 MMSCMD — about a third of the projection. The pipeline network the report called for, though, mostly got built anyway: roughly 25,400 km operational by mid-2025 against the report's 28,000–33,000 km five-to-six-year target. That combination — infrastructure sized to a demand curve that never arrived — is exactly the roughly-50%-utilised gas grid this blog's companion piece on pipeline utilisation describes, a decade later.

746 MMSCMD2013 report's demand projection for 2029-30

~188–197 MMSCMDActual Indian gas consumption, FY2024 and 2025

272 MMSCMDDemand-supply gap the 2013 report itself projected for 2029-30

297–365 MMSCMDPNGRB's own 2025-vintage demand projection for 2030 — under half the 2013 figure

What the 2013 report actually projected

PNGRB's industry-group authors built their "realistic demand" projection sector by sector: power, fertiliser, city gas, industrial, petrochemicals/refineries/internal consumption, and sponge iron/steel. The total was projected to grow from 242.66 MMSCMD in 2012-13 to 746.03 MMSCMD in 2029-30, a compound annual growth rate of 6.8–6.83% (the report states both figures in different places). Power was expected to be the single biggest driver, its share of total demand rising from 36% to about 47% over the period, while fertiliser's share was expected to fall from 25% to 15% even as its absolute volume grew from 59.9 to 110 MMSCMD (then plateau). City gas distribution's share was expected to nearly double, from 6% to 11%, reaching 85.6 MMSCMD by 2029-30. Regionally, the report expected the Western market's share of demand to shrink from 42% to 32% as the Northern, Southern and Eastern markets caught up on the back of new pipeline connectivity, with the North-Eastern region's demand expected to more than quadruple off a very low base (5 to 24 MMSCMD).

On supply, the report projected total availability growing from 145.7 MMSCMD in 2012-13 to 474 MMSCMD in 2029-30 (a 7.2% CAGR), with domestic production rising only modestly (101 to 230 MMSCMD) while LNG imports did most of the work (44.6 to 214 MMSCMD), plus 30 MMSCMD via the TAPI cross-border pipeline from an assumed 2017-18 commissioning. The report is candid, even at the time of writing, that its own domestic-supply numbers were already stale: it notes that actual domestic output had fallen to around 85 MMSCMD by January 2013, below its own 101 MMSCMD figure for 2012-13, "primarily due to steady reduction in supply from KG-D6 fields."

Because demand was projected to consistently outrun supply, the report's central number is arguably its demand-supply gap: 97 MMSCMD in 2012-13, narrowing after 2017-18 as new LNG terminals and TAPI came online, then widening back out to roughly 272 MMSCMD by 2029-30 as demand growth outpaced supply additions. On infrastructure, the report counted about 13,030 km of transmission pipeline and 337 MMSCMD of design capacity as of 2012, and called for this to expand to roughly 28,000–32,727 km and 815 MMSCMD of design capacity within five to six years, forming a National Gas Grid connecting all major demand and supply centres. Its policy recommendations centred on legally unbundling pipeline transportation from gas marketing within two to three years, establishing an open-access code, moving from a zonal to an entry-exit tariff system, developing a gas-trading hub, and progressively removing the Gas Utilisation Policy's administrative allocation of domestically produced gas in favour of a freer market.

The full demand trajectory, year by year

The report's own year-by-year table lets its projection be checked against reality at any point along the way, not just at the 2029-30 endpoint:

What actually happened

Reliable, directly-comparable Indian gas-consumption figures for every one of those years were not all available to this piece, but the more recent anchor points are clear enough to show the scale of the gap. Trade-press reporting citing PPAC data (via this blog's earlier research) puts India's actual natural gas consumption at roughly 188 MMSCMD in FY2023-24 and roughly 197.1 MMSCMD in 2025, with domestic production at roughly 98.9 MMSCMD in 2025. Set against the report's own numbers for the comparable years — 571.09 MMSCMD projected demand for 2023-24, 598.11 MMSCMD for 2024-25 — actual demand ran at roughly one-third of what the 2013 report expected, and actual domestic production at well under half of what it projected for domestic supply in the same window (182 MMSCMD projected for 2021-22 in the report's supply table).

The pipeline network is the one place the 2013 vision came close to being right, at least on length. This blog's earlier research (again via PIB year-end reviews, not a document read directly) put India's operational gas trunk pipeline network at roughly 25,400 km by June 2025, with an authorised length of roughly 34,200 km — not far off the report's 28,000–32,727 km five-to-six-year target, albeit reached on a much longer timeline than "five to six years" from 2013. The problem, as this blog's companion piece on pipeline utilisation covers in detail, is that a network built to move demand approaching 600–750 MMSCMD is now moving demand closer to 200 MMSCMD: PNGRB's own chairman has publicly put nationwide gas-pipeline utilisation at around 50%, with some individual lines running under 10% full.

Even 2040 might not reach the 2013 report's 2030 number

The starkest way to see the gap is against PNGRB's own more recent outlook. A PNGRB in-house paper puts India's 2030 gas demand at 297 MMSCMD on a "good-to-go" scenario or 364.6 MMSCMD on a "good-to-best" scenario, and 2040 demand at 495–630 MMSCMD — figures this blog first found via search and has since confirmed directly, in full, inside PNGRB's own 2025 "Vision 2040" expert committee report (see this piece's sequel, linked below), which synthesises that PNGRB paper alongside four other forecasts into an overall base case of 260–300 MMSCMD by 2030 and 365–500 MMSCMD by 2040, rising to 630–700 MMSCMD by 2040 only in a full-reform scenario. Every one of those figures for 2040 is below the 2013 report's number for 2030 (746 MMSCMD). On PNGRB's own current thinking, in other words, India is not expected to reach by 2040 the level of gas demand a 2013 industry report thought it would reach by 2030 — a full decade's worth of projected demand growth that, a decade later, simply has not shown up.

Why the gap: gas didn't win the fights it was supposed to win

The 2013 report's central bet was that gas would substitute for oil and, especially, that gas-fired power generation would expand rapidly on the back of new LNG import capacity. That bet did not pay off the way the report expected. Gas-fired power plants built in the 2000s and early 2010s were left stranded through much of the following decade by a combination of high landed LNG prices and limited domestic gas allocation, while India's power-sector growth over the same period leaned heavily on coal, and increasingly on solar and wind, rather than gas. Fertiliser demand grew, but the report's own projection already expected its share of gas demand to shrink, and city-gas and industrial demand, while growing, took far longer to reach the scale the report assumed — a slower, more gradual build-out of city gas distribution networks and last-mile industrial connections than a report written at the start of India's CGD expansion could have anticipated. The 2013 report's own candour about domestic production already falling short of its base-year number, months after that number was set, is an early sign the underlying assumptions were already under strain before the projection period had even properly started.

What doesn't follow from any of this

None of this shows the 2013 report's authors were incompetent or acting in bad faith: infrastructure and energy-demand forecasting a decade or more out is a genuinely hard problem, and this report's central policy recommendations (unbundling, open access, entry-exit tariffs, a trading hub) were reasonable asks regardless of how the demand numbers played out, several of which India has since moved on in some form. Nor does the pipeline network's current under-utilisation mean the capacity was wasted money: PNGRB's own current demand projections still see gas demand roughly doubling or more by 2040 from today's level, and a national gas grid built ahead of that demand is a defensible long-term bet even if it sits underused for a decade or two while demand catches up — the same argument this blog's companion piece on pipeline utilisation makes about the same network. And the comparison in §3 and §4 mixes a directly-read 2013 document against search-sourced figures for actual consumption and current projections, which is a real limitation on how precisely these numbers can be compared, not just a rounding issue.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.