Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL) will commission its Paradip refinery in the third quarter of 2013-14, asserted its project head after a review meeting with the state government.
“We were not getting the required number of labourers due to law and order situation and that is why there was the delay. But the situation has improved now and we have completed almost 88 per cent of the work. We will definitely commission the plant in the last quarter of 2013,” said executive director of IOCL, Paradip, M Vijayvargiya.
This project is expected to complete all mechanical equipment installation by March 2013 while the stabilization process will take another three to four months.
Earlier, IOCL had targeted to commission the 15-million-tonne-per-annum refinery by March 2012, but it was delayed for one year. Meanwhile, the cost of the refinery project has escalated 2.5 per cent mainly due to delays over issues pertaining to sourcing of water from Jobra barrage of Mahanadi river as well as law and order problems.
So far, the company has erected primary distillation columns, captive power plant, secondary crude processing unit and is building crude product storage areas.
The state government, which directed the company to speed up its peripheral development work to win the trust of the locals, assured the company of providing security.
“We have already set up a police station inside the area and there is a proposal to upgrade it to an industrial police station,” said Arabinda Padhee, revenue divisional commissioner for central range, who also attended the project review meeting headed by Chief Secretary B K Patnaik.
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The government also asked the company to provide details of the progress of construction work intermittently.
In June, union minister of state for statistics and programme implementation Srikant Jena had criticised the state government for not enough interest to expedite the construction of the project.
The Paradip refinery would produce 5.97 million tonnes of diesel, 3.4 million tonnes of petrol, 1.45 million tonnes of kerosene/ATF, 536,000 tonnes of LPG, 124,000 tonnes of naphtha and 335,000 tonnes of sulphur, all of which would be for sale in the domestic market.
Besides the Rs 29,777-crore cost of the refinery, the IOCL’s Paradip project also includes construction of a Rs 1,793-crore pipeline to Raipur and Ranchi. The work of the 1,100-km pipeline is in progress, which would carry the fuel produced in the unit to consumers in Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Out of a 660-km pipeline inside Odisha, 600 km is being laid smoothly.