Late night talks between OSOA and Government representatives including Petroleum Minister Murli Deora, at IOC Colony, Noida failed around 1 a.m. “It was too late. Talks remained inconclusive,” said Sarthak Behuria, chairman, Indian Oil Corp. (IOC)

Several pumps ran out of petrol and diesel, including some in the national capital (See Express Newsline). Mumbai ran out of compressed natural gas on which some 2 lakh local buses, taxis and autos run. Some flights were delayed following delays in refuelling aircraft because of the absence of officers, mainly from IOC and Bharat Petroleum.

There will be no supply of piped gas to 3.5 lakh domestic consumers in Mumbai from tomorrow. Public transport in Delhi will come to a halt on Saturday when the city exhausts its stocks of CNG.

“We have been managing the situation till now, but there are supply constraints,” Behuria said, adding, “we might see dryouts from tomorrow.”

Deora’s statement on Wednesday announcing a likely cut in petrol and diesel prices, hastened the dryout of pumps. Dealers went slow on lifting stocks for fear of losing heavily if prices fell soon after.

Four of IOC’s seven refineries remained shut on Thursday, including Mathura and Panipat that feed the northern region. With the Jamnagar-Loni LPG pipeline also switched off, the region will start facing a major crunch in cooking gas cylinders. Officers did not turn up to man LPG bottling plants for the second day, and workers refused to load cylinders on trucks. The wait period for a gas cylinder has already reached seven days.

OSOA officials, who are in hiding, said the stir may intensify as the Petroleum Employees’ Union, an association of oil sector workers, may also extend support from tomorrow.

The face-off between the government and the striking officers took an ugly turn with the ministry implementing its threat to terminate the services of 67 officers — three from IOC and 64 from Oil & Natural Gas Corp (ONGC). Delhi, Assam, Gujarat, Rajasthan, UP and Maharashtra have invoked the Essential Services Management Act (ESMA) under which arrest warrants have been issued against the strikers.

Deora was away from the Capital most of the day, returning late evening for a meeting of the Empowered Group of Ministers to decide the utilization of Reliance gas from the Krishna-Godavari field. A meeting between OSOA and the IOC management ended in drama this morning with Delhi and UP Police trying unsuccessfully to arrest OSOA office-bearers.

Behuria said no progress could be made as the OSOA harped on the same issues. “We said we can do nothing since a high-level ministerial committee is already looking into it.” OSOA, representing 45,000 officers from 14 oil and gas PSUs, feels the recent pay revision by the Government did not address their demands in full, and the raises were much below what the Rao Committee had recommended.

The agitation has badly affected industrial units in the western and northern regions, especially those on the Hazira-Bijapur-Jagdishpur gas pipeline. Besides lower crude oil and natural gas output, power generation and urea production has been hit in units fed by the HBJ pipeline.

Even as the ministry claimed that gas supply in HBJ would be augmented by sourcing from Petronet LNG Ltd, sources said that its delivery to end-users would be anyway stuck as the strike had put the Dahej-Bijapur pipeline out of operation.

Petroleum Secretary RS Pandey said crude production was at 80 per cent of normal, and refineries were 70 per cent operational. Gas supply situation “has not worsened”, he added. Crude output has declined to 270,000 barrels per day from the usual 350,000 bpd. Gas production has fallen by 33 million standard cubic metres per day.

Pandey said two ONGC officials, who were arrested on Wednesday for inciting the stir, had been released on interim bail after they gave an undertaking that they would ask their colleagues to give up the path of confrontation.