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Indian Oil to finish Kochi LPG terminal in 2021
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
STATE-RUN Indian Oil has said it intends to finish the construction of its delayed liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) import terminal project at the port of Kochi in Kerala State within the next 18 months.
Local authorities gave Indian Oil the green light this week to resume work on the terminal, which is located in the Puthuvype industrial area, after years of protests finally forced the company to suspend the INR7.5bn ($105.5mn) project in February 2017.
Indian Oil’s head of LPG operations, C N Rajendra Kumar, said this week that around 45% of the terminal had been completed by the time work stopped.
“If the work was not halted, we would have commissioned the project by now. We had held around 30 meetings with the protesters and addressed almost all their concerns. Still, some people were unconvinced,” Kumar told local daily New Indian Express. Noting that the pro- ject had adopted global safety standards, Kumar said a third of the terminal’s cost was being spent on safety.
Local protestors, however, have pledged
to resume their demonstrations. Opponents
have slammed a risk assessment certifying that
the terminal poses only a minimal risk to the
surrounding area as being fake and have com-
plained that the state government has not made
a decision on the project, as was agreed between
allsidesin2017. “Accidentsarestilltakingplaceandthethreat
Local authorities reportedly ordered police on December 17 to prevent any protests in and around the project site.
The terminal is a key to efforts aimed at reducing road transportation of LPG, which is currently imported via the port of Mangaluru in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. Kumar
of a disaster is lurking,” Kumar said.
In addition to the Kochi terminal, Indian Oil
has also teamed up with Kochi Salem Pipeline to build an LPG pipeline from the port to Salem in Tamil Nadu State. Kumar said the 370-km pipe- line project would displace the majority of the current LPG road transportation.™
said around 75,000 LPG tankers transported fuel across Kerala every year, adding that this was “highly risky” and that the state had witnessed more than 60 accidents involving road tankers over the last five years.
RIL, BP form retail fuel venture
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
INDIAN conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and UK super-major BP have agreed to create a new joint venture that will operate a network of retail fuel and aviation fuel stations across India.
The two companies signed a definitive agree- ment on December 16 that paves the way to forming the joint venture in the first half of 2020, pending regulatory and other approvals.
Under the terms of the agreement, the new company will assume control of RIL’s roughly 1,400 retail fuel stations and more than 30 jet fuel stations at airports. These networks will be expanded to 5,500 and 45 respectively over the next five years.
The definitive agreement follows on from the companies’ initial announcement in August that they intended to team up in the retail space. RIL said at the time that it would control 51% of the new venture and that BP would pay INR70bn ($985.7mn) to acquire a 49% stake in the exist- ing assets.
The Indian government is eager to increase competition within the country’s downstream, which is still dominated by state-run companies. Of the more than 66,000 fuel stations in India, almost 60,000 are operated by state majors such as Indian Oil Corp. (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petro- leum Corporation Ltd (HPCL).
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 50 19•December•2019