State-owned GAIL India Ltd has sought assured natural gas supplies from Qatar to set up a $1.3 billion mega petrochemical plant with Reliance Industries (RIL) in the gas-rich nation.
"We are in discussions with Qatar for setting up a petrochemical plant. We need assured feedstock," GAIL Chairman and Managing Director B C Tripathi said on the sidelines of the 6th Asia Gas Partnership Summit here.
GAIL had last year held preliminary discussions with Qatar Petrochemical Company (QAPCO) and would now discuss the project in more details.
"So far, they have not committed anything," Tripathi said. RIL and GAIL had on December 4, 2007 signed an MoU to jointly set up a mega gas-based petrochemical plant.
They had initially identified 10 countries -- Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Vietnam, Australia, South Africa, Angola, Mexico, Russia and the Former Soviet Union -- for exploring possibilities of setting up a 1.9-million-tonne chemical plant.
They had then zeroed in on Qatar, Iran, Algeria, Nigeria and Russia. The two are looking at countries that can provide natural gas as feedstock for the unit."
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GAIL and Reliance intends to float a special purpose vehicle with equal stake to set up the overseas petrochemical plant.
The state-owned firm has also shown interest in setting up a petrochemical unit in Iran and would soon open up discussions with the National Petrochemical Company of Iran.
Reliance and GAIL believe that there is a huge demand for petrochemical products worldwide.
This would need new capacities and therefore, opportunity of setting up global size petrochemical complexes, preferably gas-based, in gas-rich countries is being explored.