Paradip port expanding, seeks private investments

Paradip, one of the major ports on the eastern coast and the only major port in Odisha, is on an expansion mode.

It plans to invite firms to invest in erection and commissioning of facilities to handle liquid bulk cargoes such as mineral oils and vegetable oils.  The port will allot 5 acres of land to each private investor to erect storage tanks and associated infrastructure for cargo handling and provide the necessary ‘right of way’ to lay pipelines from the oil jetty to tanks.

 Talking to Business Line in Bhubaneswar recently, S.S. Mishra, Chairman, Paradip Port Trust, said the decision to invite private investment was aimed at maximising the capacity utilisation and to meet the growing demand for liquid bulk cargoes in the vast hinterland.

Although the port has a 6 million tonnes per annum (mmtpa) capacity in the northern oil jetty, the current usage is only a third — about 2 mmtpa of POL (petroleum, oil and lubricants) — handled by oil majors such as IOC, HPCL and BPCL.

 “We are keen to provide the requisite infrastructure facilities to port users for storage and handling of all kinds of liquid bulk cargoes including POL, non-POL cargoes such as benzene, naphtha, ethanol, CBFS and so on, as also various edible and non-edible vegetable oils,” Mishra said, adding that the berth is being dredged to create a draft of 16 metres (14 m at present) to handle vessels of 125,000 DWT size.

Paradip has a cargo handling capacity of 106 mmtpa, the highest among all major ports at present.

In 2012-13, the port handled 56.5 million tonnes to serve the hinterland in Orissa, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, Mishra said.

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