Petronet LNG Ltd, India's biggest gas importer, plans to hike its Dahej import terminal capacity to 17.5 million tons from current 10 million tons, its chief executive A K Balyan said today.
"We have awarded all contracts for expansion of the capacity from 10 million tons to 15 million tons. By November 2016, Dahej terminal would be operating at 15 million tons capacity," he said.
Further, the company is looking a de-bottlenecking and other improvements in project design to further raise the capacity to 17.5 million tons.
"Studies are being done for debottlenecking," he said.
Petronet, he said, has this month completed commissioning of a second jetty which will allow larger ships carrying natural gas in its liquid form (liquefied natural gas or LNG) to dock at the port in Gujarat.
"We can now import bigger Q-Flex ships, with 216,000 cubic meters capacity, all around the year and Q-Max vessels, with 266,000 cubic meters carrying capacity, during fair weather (when sea is not rough)," he said.
The second jetty would give Petronet more flexibility of imports.
Petronet, which had in September last year commissioned a 5 million tons a year import facility at Kochi in Kerala, is also building a similar capacity terminal at Gangavaram in Andhra Pradesh.
"We have all statutory approvals in place. All that we now need is a no-objection certificate from the Andhra Pradesh government. The NOC got delayed because of the review of contractual arrangements between the state government and the Gangavaran port. We are now given to understand that the NOC will come anytime now," Balyan said.
He said Petronet has signed a deal to buy 0.8 million tons of LNG from Qatar's RasGas in the current fiscal for supply to Indian Oil Corp (IOC).
Petronet already imports 7.5 million tons a year of LNG from RasGas on a 25 year contract.
The one-year deal is beyond this contracted capacity.
