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Three facilities to store crude oil and petroleum products in underground caverns will be made ready by the second half of 2014, said Veerappa Moily, Union Petroleum Minister.
Speaking to presspersons on the sidelines of the inauguration of the Single Point Mooring facility of Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd in Mangalore on Saturday, he said that 90 per cent of the work on the underground cavern in Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh), and Mangalore and Padur in Karnataka, have been completed.
L.N. Gupta, Secretary of the Oil Industry Development Board (the funding agency for Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd, a special purpose vehicle created to helm the project), said that the storage facilities are being built at a cost of Rs 4,000 crore. Till now, around Rs 2,500 crore have been spent on the project, he said.
The total running length of these caverns will be around 30 km. The Padur facility will be the longest with 13 km of caverns, followed by Mangalore with 9 km, and Visakhapatnam with 7 km.
All these caverns are likely to be completed by August-September of 2014, Gupta said. These three facilities will have a storage capacity of 5 million tonnes. This can meet India’s fuel needs for 15 days. Added to this, the country has reserves for around 70 days in various refineries, he said.
More such facilities Later, in an informal chat with Business Line , Gupta said that the Government is planning to set up such caverns in four more places in the second phase. A detailed project report has been done for this purpose. The second phase will add another 12.5 million tonnes of storage capacity. Bikaner in Rajasthan, Rajkot in Gujarat, Chandipur in Odisha and Padur in Karnataka, have been identified as the storage locations, he added.
P.P. Upadhya, Managing Director of MRPL, said that the mooring facility , along with a coastal booster pumping station, has been set up in Mangalore at a cost of over Rs 1,000 crore. The facility in the high seas will enable MRPL to ship in crude parcels on Very Large Crude Carriers. This will provide freight economies and also optimize on logistics. This will also help MRPL to source West African and Latin American crude oil that provides cost advantages, he said.
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