India's oil-product pipelines are running close to, and in places above, their design capacity: PNGRB's own register puts the multi-product network at roughly 69% cumulative utilisation over eight months of 2025, and Oil India's Numaligarh–Siliguri crude line at 91% for FY2024-25. Its trunk natural-gas pipeline network — more than three times the length — is the mirror image: PNGRB's own chairman has put nationwide gas-pipeline utilisation at around 50%, an independent energy-finance analysis puts it lower still, and both agree some individual lines run under 10% full. This piece lays out what each regulator's own numbers say, why the two networks diverge so sharply, and the tariff reform PNGRB has now built specifically to reward higher utilisation — with an explicit, upfront flag on how this piece was researched and where its numbers could not be independently confirmed.
India's Gas Pipelines Run at Half Capacity. Its Oil Pipelines Have the Opposite Problem
The short version. India's product pipelines — crude oil and refined fuels — are largely full: PNGRB's own monitoring register shows the multi-product common-carrier network running at a cumulative 69.40% of authorised capacity across April–November 2025, and Oil India's Numaligarh–Siliguri crude line at 91.46% for FY2024-25, both near or above the level regulators consider healthy. India's natural-gas trunk network is the reverse: PNGRB's own chairman told the trade press in 2025 that the roughly 25,000-km network was "operating at only 50% capacity" against a 400 MMSCMD carrying capacity, with some individual lines "less than ten percent" full; an independent energy-finance analysis put nationwide gas-pipeline utilisation lower still, at a capacity-weighted 41%. PNGRB's tariff reforms since mid-2025 explicitly tie a "Pipeline Development Reserve" to utilisation above 75%, which is itself an admission of how far short of that most gas lines fall.
Two pipeline systems, two very different fill levels
India's downstream pipeline network is really three separate builds that get talked about as one thing: crude-oil trunk lines carrying feedstock to refineries, refined-product and LPG lines carrying petrol, diesel, jet fuel and cooking gas out to distribution terminals, and the natural-gas trunk grid carrying gas to city networks, fertiliser plants and industry. The first two are commercial infrastructure built mostly by the refiners themselves (Indian Oil, HPCL, BPCL, Oil India) to move their own product to their own markets, sized against demand they control. The third was built substantially ahead of confirmed gas supply, on the expectation — not fully realised — that domestic gas production and LNG imports would grow fast enough to fill it. That difference in how each network was planned is the simplest explanation for why one runs close to full and the other doesn't.
Crude and product pipelines: mostly full, some past design
The clearest company-level number is Oil India's Numaligarh–Siliguri product pipeline in Assam, which the company's FY2024-25 annual report states moved 1.574 million tonnes at a utilisation of 91.46% of installed capacity — high enough that the company has approved raising the line's capacity from 1.72 to 5.5 million tonnes a year. Indian Oil's FY2024-25 annual report describes "record" pipeline throughput across its network: 96.924 million tonnes of liquids and 4,668 million standard cubic metres of gas moved through its pipelines that year, with product-pipeline throughput specifically at 45.4 million tonnes, up 3% on the year before and the highest the company has recorded. HPCL's FY2024-25 annual report similarly describes its "highest-ever pipeline throughput" at 26.90 million tonnes across a network of 17 pipelines spanning 5,134 km. GAIL's LPG pipelines — the Jamnagar–Loni and Vizag–Secunderabad lines, together roughly 2,040 km with 4.58 million tonnes a year of capacity — carried 4.478 million tonnes in FY2024-25, which on its face is close to 98% of nameplate capacity; GAIL has approved expanding the Jamnagar–Loni line from 3.25 to 6.5 million tonnes a year specifically to relieve that pressure.
PNGRB's own register of multi-product common-carrier pipelines — the subset of the product-pipeline network open to more than one refiner's product — showed authorised length of roughly 14,800 km against roughly 9,600 km actually operating as of late 2025, and a cumulative capacity utilisation of 69.40% across April to November 2025. A separate zonal study PNGRB commissioned put a different figure on the informal side of the network: it found that roughly 70% of total product-pipeline capacity nationally operates in "self-use" mode — a refiner moving its own product on its own line rather than opening it to others — and that some individual lines run beyond their design capacity while others sit underused because the network as a whole isn't well connected between refining hubs and demand centres. Both of these are PNGRB's own figures, not independently verified by this piece; they should be read as the regulator's own assessment, not this piece's calculation.
The gas grid's utilisation problem, in the regulator's own words
The trunk natural-gas pipeline network is a different story by every account this piece found. Government progress reports (successive Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas year-end reviews, via the Press Information Bureau) describe the operational network growing steadily — from 15,340 km in 2014 to roughly 21,700 km by mid-2022, roughly 24,900 km by early 2024, and roughly 25,400 km by June 2025 — against an authorised length that had reached roughly 34,200 km by mid-2025, meaning close to 10,500 km of authorised pipeline was still under construction. None of those year-end reviews, as far as this piece could establish, states a nationwide utilisation percentage for the completed network.
That number instead comes from the regulator itself, in public remarks rather than a published report: PNGRB chairman Anil Kumar Jain was reported in 2025 as saying the roughly 25,000-km gas pipeline network was "operating at only 50% capacity", with a stated carrying capacity of around 400 MMSCMD, and that on some individual pipelines utilisation was "less than ten percent". Separately, an independent energy-finance research group (the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, IEEFA) published its own estimate, describing "the capacity-weighted average utilization rate of India's major gas pipelines" as 41%, with some pipelines again below 10%, in a report examining the economics of India's LNG-to-pipeline supply chain. These two figures — PNGRB's chairman's public estimate and IEEFA's independent calculation — are not the same measurement taken twice; they come from different organisations, almost certainly different sample sets and time windows, and neither is a like-for-like check on the other. What both agree on is the general scale of the problem (roughly half the network's capacity going unused, on average) and that the shortfall is not evenly spread — a handful of lines are said to run near-empty while the network average sits around 40–50%.
A third, narrower data point from PNGRB's own zonal review of the gas network singles out one specific line by name: the Jharia–Bokaro–Durgapur pipeline, which the review reportedly puts at 27% capacity utilisation. This piece could not corroborate that figure against a second source and reports it only as an illustration of what "a line running well below the network average" looks like at the level of an individual pipeline, not as a representative national statistic.
Why: gas that costs more than the pipeline that would carry it
The reasons given for gas-pipeline underutilisation, across the sources this piece could find, point in a consistent direction rather than a single cause. IEEFA's analysis attributes it to the pipelines having been built "under the premise of surging domestic gas supply" that has not fully materialised, combined with the higher landed price of imported LNG relative to what many potential industrial buyers are willing to pay, and slower-than-planned development of demand (city gas networks, industrial switching from coal or oil) along several corridors. A separate commentary (Swarajya) points to a "missing layer of regional connectivity" — industrial clusters that sit near a trunk line but were never connected to it by a spur or a city gas network, so the trunk capacity passing nearby goes unused locally even where it could in principle be sold. PNGRB's own zonal study describes this as "network imbalances and coverage gaps", and separately notes that LNG import terminals themselves are "not well-integrated with demand centers" — a 2025 PNGRB projections note cited an LNG regasification capacity of roughly 190 MMSCMD running at "near 50% utilization", with six of the country's seven terminals below 50% that year, suggesting the underutilisation problem sits upstream of the pipelines too, not only inside them.
This is not a new observation for India's gas sector. Older industry commentary on GAIL's network (cited via Stanford/Oil & Gas Journal analysis) put the company's historical breakeven point at needing to run above roughly 70% of pipeline capacity, and noted the Kochi LNG terminal running as low as 5.67% utilised in one year (2016-17) specifically for lack of downstream pipeline connectivity — the same "built ahead of confirmed demand" pattern the more recent sources describe, just a decade earlier and at the terminal rather than the trunk-pipeline level.
PNGRB's fix: a tariff reserve that only pays out above 75% utilisation
PNGRB has moved the gas-pipeline tariff framework twice in the last three years in ways that bear directly on utilisation. The first was the "Unified Tariff" reform — sometimes described as "One Nation, One Grid, One Tariff" — which took effect from 1 April 2023 and replaced a patchwork of pipeline-specific and zonal tariffs with a single nationwide rate, intended to make gas equally affordable to buy at any point on the network regardless of distance from the pipeline's operator. The levelised unified tariff was reported at roughly ₹80.97 per million British thermal units for FY2024-25.
The second, larger change came via an amendment to the Natural Gas Pipeline Tariff Regulations approved around July 2025, reported to include three specific mechanisms aimed squarely at utilisation: collapsing the number of tariff zones from three to two; requiring that at least 75% of the gas moving through a pipeline's system-use volumes be booked under contracts of three years or longer, to give pipeline operators more predictable, bankable demand; and creating a "Pipeline Development Reserve" that is funded specifically by entities whose utilisation exceeds a 75% benchmark, with half of that reserve reinvested in network expansion and half passed back to consumers as a tariff reduction. Read together with the utilisation figures above, that 75% trigger is itself a tacit admission from the regulator that most of the network is not there yet: a mechanism built to reward crossing 75% utilisation would be pointless if most pipelines were already comfortably above it. A further order in November 2025 revised GAIL's own integrated-network tariff to roughly ₹65.69 per million British thermal units, and a December 2025 order (effective 1 January 2026) simplified the unified tariff to two zones — roughly ₹54.00 per million British thermal units within 300 km of a supply point and roughly ₹102.86 beyond it — applying the shorter-distance rate nationwide specifically for CNG and domestic piped gas, a change aimed at making gas cheaper for exactly the retail and household demand PNGRB has said the network needs more of.
What doesn't follow from any of this
None of this shows India over-built its gas pipeline network by mistake, or that the roughly 10,500 km still under construction is wasted effort: a national gas grid connecting every region to LNG import terminals and domestic gas fields is a reasonable long-term goal even if demand takes years to catch up to the pipe already in the ground, and PNGRB's own 2030/2040 demand projections (roughly 300–365 MMSCMD by 2030, 495–630 MMSCMD by 2040, on the regulator's own "good-to-go" and "good-to-best" scenarios) imply the network will eventually need most of the capacity now sitting idle. Nor does the product-pipeline network's higher utilisation mean it needs no further investment: several of the same sources that describe product pipelines as well-utilised also describe individual lines running past their design capacity, which is itself a bottleneck risk, not a sign of a comfortably-sized system. And the 50%/41% gas-pipeline figures should not be read as two independent confirmations of exactly the same number — they are two different organisations' estimates, on different methods and time windows, that happen to describe a similar order of magnitude.
Sources and caveats
This piece's research was conducted almost entirely via web search; ppac.gov.in, pngrb.gov.in, pib.gov.in and sansad.in all returned a network-level block on every direct-fetch attempt from this piece's research environment. The one exception is the Mathura–Delhi pipeline utilisation figure in §2, sourced from a 2021 PNGRB stakeholder submission this piece read directly rather than via search, flagged inline where it appears; everything else below is a search-engine summarisation of a government document, not a verbatim read of one. Figures attributed to company annual reports (Indian Oil, Oil India, HPCL, GAIL) come from search-engine extracts of those filed reports and carry this piece's highest confidence tier, since companies have a compliance reason to state these accurately. Figures attributed to PNGRB's monitoring reports (its monthly Natural Gas Pipeline and Petroleum Product Pipeline "MIS" reports) come from search snippets describing those reports' contents, not from reading the underlying PDFs, and specific totals in this piece's own working notes shifted slightly between adjacent months' reports in a way consistent with the network genuinely growing month to month rather than a data error — but this piece could not open the PDFs to confirm that. The two gas-pipeline utilisation figures in §3 (PNGRB chairman's public estimate of roughly 50%, and IEEFA's independent 41% calculation) are reported as two separate, differently-sourced claims rather than reconciled into one number, exactly because this piece could not establish that they use comparable methodology. The single lowest-confidence figure in this piece is the Jharia–Bokaro–Durgapur line's reported 27% utilisation, which surfaced in only one source and is included only as an illustrative example, not a verified statistic. A reader who needs verified pipeline-utilisation figures for a real purpose (investment, regulatory filing, or academic citation) should request PNGRB's monthly MIS reports and PPAC's Ready Reckoner directly rather than rely on this piece.
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.
