IGL ambition to increase gas sales by 30%
Delhi-based Indraprastha Gas (IGL) wants to increase retail gas sales by nearly 30% in this fiscal (2011-12), company managing director Rajesh Vedvyas tells PETROWATCH.
IGL sells piped gas to factories, businesses and households in Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida and Ghaziabad, where it also operates 214 CNG stations. IGL, a GAIL and BPCL joint venture, sold up to 2.7m cm/d of gas on average across these regions in 2010-11, both as piped gas and CNG.
Vedvyas forecasts this figure could to rise to between 3m cm/d and 3.2m cm/d in 2011-12. There are plenty of eager gas-hungry customers in the areas where IGL operates, adds an industry source, with total gas demand from households expected to rise nearly 40% in 2011-12 and total demand from factories and businesses expected to rise as much as 100%.
But IGL isn’t finding it easy to source gas supplies to meet this rapid growth in demand. So it has signed ‘framework agreements’ for gas and R-LNG supplies with Shell, BG, GSPC and Petronet-LNG in addition to relying on its traditional gas supplier GAIL.
Most of the expected growth in IGL’s gas sales in 2011-12 will be from households, factories and businesses in the Greater Noida and Ghaziabad areas. Presently, we are told, IGL sells piped gas to 244,924 households and 529 factories and businesses in total.
IGL added 60,000 customers to its retail gas network in 2010-11. It plans to connect at least another 50,000 households, factories and businesses to its gas network in 2011-12.
But IGL expects demand for gas as fuel (CNG) for cars, buses and auto-rickshaws in the capital to be not so robust as in the other retail gas sectors and grow only by around 18% this fiscal.