State-owned Indian Oil Corp (IOC) on Friday said its board has approved Rs 15,034 crore investment to expand its Gujarat refinery by 2022. Expansion of capacity of refinery at Vadodara from existing 13.7 million tons to 18 million tons would “help meet the growing demand for products in the region,” the company said.
The project involves replacing some of decades-old units that being old in design and small in capacity were no longer energy-efficient. IOC Chairman Sanjiv Singh said the new refinery configuration proposed will take into account the likely disruptions in the fuel supply-demand scenario in the future and will have built-in flexibility in its operations for strong integration with downstream petrochemical units.
“Gujarat Refinery, which went on stream in October 1965 as a one million tons per annum unit, heralded India's capabilities to build refineries on its own. In the same vein, we are now proposing to incorporate IOC’s own R&D technologies for both IndMax and kerosene hydrodesulphurisation units,” he said.
The IndMax unit is being designed for high yields of propylene, for which a polypropylene unit of 420,000 tonnes capacity is being set up as a downstream petrochemical unit as part of the refinery configuration, he said. PP is used in a variety of applications, including packaging for consumer products, plastic parts for automotive and other industries, and textiles.
IOC plans to raise the combined capacity of its 11 group refineries from 80.7 mn tonnes a year currently to over 100 m tonnes in the next five years through brownfield expansions. It is also pursuing a 60 million tons integrated refinery-cum-petrochemicals project on the west coast jointly with other BPCl and HPCl.