Bhagyanagar Gas begins Kakinada grid soon
Hyderabad-based gas retailer Bhagyanagar Gas is forging ahead with plans to set up a city gas network in the Andhra Pradesh coastal town of Kakinada.
PETROWATCH learns from a senior company source that Bhagyanagar will begin laying its gas pipeline network in Kakinada - which also happens to be near the landfall point for D6 gas - sometime in the next four weeks. Bhagyanagar has ordered 75-km of steel pipe with 4-inch, 6-inch and 10-inch diameters, currently being coated by Welspun in Gujarat.
Project Management Consultant Mecon will supervise the pipeline laying work, we are told, and should complete it over the next two to three years. Industry sources say that at present 22 contracts related to the Kakinada city gas network are in the process of being awarded.
These include contracts to lay stretches of pipeline and to supply gas meters and ‘metering skids’ which are skid-mounted units composed of gas meters and pipes. Bhagyanagar has committed to connect 47,000 Kakinada households with piped gas supplies within the next five years.
Separately, Bhagyanagar plans to inaugurate its first CNG ‘mother’ retail station in Kakinada by end-June. “This CNG station is ready and can begin work but for a few clearances which we are pushing through,” we hear.
Kakinada has no city gate station yet so initial CNG supplies for Kakinada will be transported in cylinders stacked horizontally (cascades) on the backs of trucks from a Bhagyanagar city gate station at Vijayawada some 275-km away. Bhagyanagar is working to set up a city gas station at Kakinada on a plot of land recently acquired from local authorities, which will be connected to GAIL’s pipeline network.
Kakinada is a prosperous port town, with about 500,000 people and 5000 vehicles. Bhagyanagar believes demand for CNG and piped gas there is “promising.
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