The Reliance Group is planning to invest over Rs 4,500 crore in laying 5,895 km of pipelines across the country as a precursor to rolling out its petrol and diesel retail outlets.
Reliance is expected to start retailing transportation fuels next year. A formal proposal to this effect has been submitted to the petroleum ministry by the Gas Transportation & Infrastructure Co (GTIC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries.
Reliance has an ambitious plan of establishing 5,849 high-end retail outlets for petroleum products across the country, and the 5,895 km product pipeline will feed this retail network.
Reliance will build the pipelines on a common carrier principle with 25 per cent excess capacity, which will be offered to any firm willing to share the capacity on a firm take-or-pay basis. A Reliance spokesperson declined to comment on the issue.
GTIC has proposed to invest Rs 1,640 crore in a pipeline from Jamnagar to Patiala, another Rs 1,780 crore in the Jamnagar-Kanpur pipeline, Rs 460 crore in the Goa-Hyderabad stretch, Rs 325 crore in the Chennai-Bangalore one, Rs 110 crore in the Kakinada-Vijayawada pipeline and Rs 260 crore in the Haldia-Ranchi length.
The 1,580 km Jamnagar-Patiala and 2,540 km Jamnagar-Kanpur pipelines will feed petrol stations in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, directly from the Jamnagar refinery in Gujarat.
Reliance is likely to transport petrol and diesel by ship from its refinery in Gujarat to ports in Goa, Chennai, Kakinada and Haldia.
From the port cities, four pipelines will evacuate the products for feeding petrol stations in Karnataka, parts of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar and Jharkhand.
The project is to be financed on a 2:1 debt-equity basis, but the details are yet to be firmed up.
Other private companies like Essar Oil have also chalked out plans to enter the retail market with transportation fuels. Even state-owned upstream oil major Oil and Natural Gas Corporation has embarked on setting up a retail network to market the fuel of its recently acquired Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd.
The Indian Oil Corporation now has the largest network of 1,550 retail outlets and an extensive network of over 22,000 sales points, backed by 182 bulk storage points and 78 LPG bottling plants.
