No money shortage at IOC in $1.5bn budget
IndianOil has set aside a massive Rs8500cr ($1.5bn) for refinery, pipeline and petrochemical projects in the next fiscal beginning April this year.
A large chunk of this or Rs4900cr ($900m) will be spent on the Paradip refinery where IOC wants to commission the Atmospheric Vacuum unit, Delayed Coker Unit and Diesel Hydro-treater by September this year. Another Rs270cr ($49m) is earmarked to upgrade its Mathura refinery in Uttar Pradesh, where it is revamping the Fluidised Catalytic Cracking Unit from 1.3m t/y to 1.5m t/y.
IOC also wants to increase Mathura's propylene production from 22,000 t/y to 162,000 t/y by June this year. Don't forget the Ennore LNG project where IOC will spend Rs300cr ($54), partly on hiring a consultant but also on evaluating bids for storage tanks at the terminal, which it wants completed by 2016.
Pipelines will eat up another Rs1300cr ($235m) chunk. Of this, Rs488cr ($88m) will be spent on three cross-country gas pipelines laid by a consortium of Gujarat State Petronet, IOC, Bharat Petroleum, and Hindustan Petroleum: the 1625-km pipeline from Mehsana in Gujarat to Bhatinda in Punjab with 77.11m cm/d capacity; the 1746-km pipeline from Mallavaram in Andhra Pradesh to Bhilwara in Rajasthan with 76.25m cm/d capacity; and the 750-km pipeline from Bhatinda to Srinagar in Kashmir with 42.4m cm/d capacity.
IOC aims to lay these pipelines by July 2014 or within three years of PNGRB authorisation. IOC has also budgeted Rs450cr ($81m) to de-bottleneck its Salaya to Mathura crude oil pipeline and increase capacity from 21m t/y to 25m t/y.
