Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and GAIL India Ltd have evinced interest in picking up stake in the Rs 5,000—crore Kochi petrochemical project that Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) is building in joint venture with Korea’s LG Chemicals.

“We have got written proposal from several companies to join the project,” BPCL Chairman and Managing Director R K Singh said on the sidelines of the Petrotech Conference here.

Explorer ONGC and GAIL shown interest in taking equity stake, he said.

The petrochemical complex is being built with LG Chemicals as the lead partner. “They (LG) will take 51 per cent stake,” he said. For the moment, BPCL has the remaining 49 per cent.

“The equity structure of the petrochemical joint venture has not yet been finalised. But it has been more or less agreed that LG will be the lead partner,” he added.

The project will be build along with the Rs 14,500 crore expansion of the Kochi refinery from 9.5 million tons now to 15.5 million tons by 2015—16.

As part of this project, it would be establishing a petrochemical fluid catalytic cracker to generate 500 TMTPA of propylene. This would offer BPCL a launch pad for diversification into petrochemicals.

Completion of the project would be dovetailed into the refinery expansion project.

Singh said the petrochemical project will be completed by December 2015 and commissioned by March 16. It will produce high—value products like acrylic acid (which is currently not produced in India) and super absorbent polymers that are used in manufacture of diapers. Also, it would manufacture oxoalcohol that is a feed stock in manufacture of paints and certain cosmetics.

Kochi refinery’s new units would include a 10.5 million tons crude distillation unit, a 2.2 million tons fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) unit, a 4.3 million tons diesel hydrotreater, a 3 million tons vacuum gasoil hydrotreater and a 3.84 million tons delayed coker.

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