Current Affairs: Indian Oil Corporation will invest Rs 1.75 lakh crore over the next seven years on expanding refinery capacity, building petrochemical plants and laying pipelines.
The plan includes spending Rs 34,555 crore in the 15 million tonnes a year Paradip oil refinery in Odisha that has recently started producing fuel.
Besides, the refinery expansion projects planned include raising Panipat refinery capacity to 20.2 million tonnes from 15 million tonnes currently at a cost of Rs 15,000 crore as well as raising capacity at Koyali, Mathura and Barauni units by 2020.
Paradip has started producing fuel and helped Indian Oil Corp regain the top refinery slot in the country.
Prior to Paradip, its eight refineries had a cumulative capacity of 54.2 million tons of crude oil. Paradip helped Indian Oil overtake Reliance Industries, which has twin refineries at Jamnagar in Gujarat with a capacity of 62 million tonnes.
Essar Oil is the only other private refiner having a 20 million tonnes a year unit at Vadinar in Gujarat.
IOC is looking at raising capacity of its 13.7 million tonnes a year Koyali refinery in Gujarat by 4.3 million tonnes as well as hiking capacity of Mathura refinery in Uttar Pradesh by three million tonnes to 11 million tonnes in two stages – first to 9.2 million tons and than to 11 million tonnes.
A small capacity addition of 0.5 million tons is also planned at 7.5 million tonnes Haldia refinery in West Bengal.
Also, the Barauni refinery in Bihar will be expanded from 6 million tonnes to 7 million tonnes in first phase and than to 9 million tonnes in second.
New pipelines planned include Paradip-Raipur-Ranchi product pipeline, debottlenecking of Salaya-Mathura crude oil pipeline, augmentation of Paradip-Haldia-Barauni crude oil pipeline, Paradip-Hyderabad pipeline and Jaipur-Panipat naphtha pipeline.
