Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) will set up its second LPG bottling plant in Odisha in Balangir district, an official said on Friday.
The BPCL plant costing Rs 103 crore will be located at Barkhani, BPCL Regional Manager (East) Atul Kumar said.
Expected to be commissioned by March 2020, the new plant spread over 23 acres will have a bottling capacity of 42 lakh cylinders per year.
The company already has a LPG bottling plant in Khurda.
The Balangir plant will supply LPG cylinders to consumers in Balangir, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Bargarh, Kalahandi, Sonepur, Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, Boudh, Kandhamal, Rayagada and Nuapada districts.
Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan and Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Thaawar Chand Gehlot are scheduled to lay the foundation stone of the plant on May 21.
BPCL has 15.37 lakh customers in the state, who use around 78 lakh cylinders per year. The consumption is expected to increase to 105 lakh cylinders by 2020.
Oil marketing companies have LPG bottling plants at Balasore, Jharsuguda, Khurda and Jatni. The current bottling capacity of these four plants is 2.80 crore cylinders per annum.
In addition to the proposed Balangir plant, oil marketing companies plan to set up new plants at Bhubaneswar and Rayagada.
Once all are functional, the seven plants in Odisha will have a total bottling capacity of 4.06 crore cylinders per annum.
LPG consumers in Odisha have gone up to 62.17 lakh as on May 1 compared with 20.22 lakh as of June 1, 2014.
The demand for bottled LPG in the state was 454.3 thousand matric tonnes last year and is expected to go up to 610 TMT by 2020.
--IANS
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