Newsletter
Bharat Petroleum (BPCL) and Oil India (OIL) have agreed to work together on setting up a new oil refinery and petrochemical plant near Ramayapatnam Port in Andhra Pradesh.
The project, still in the planning stage, will be one of India’s biggest, with a capacity to process 9–12 million tonnes of crude oil every year and an estimated cost of ₹1 lakh crore.
Context: this comes at a time when the US has been urging India to cut down its purchases of Russian oil amid ongoing Western sanctions following the Ukraine conflict.
The deets: the complex will house a 1.5 MMTPA ethylene cracker unit, the first of its kind in South India, and is set to go live by FY2030. The project already has 6,000 acres of land and key approvals, with OIL likely to come on board as a minority partner.
Simply put, the new complex will have a huge chemical processing unit that can produce 1.5 million tonnes of ethylene every year, a key raw material used to make plastics, packaging, paints, and everyday household products. This is where crude oil is turned into the building blocks for things we use daily.
Why it matters: once completed, the new refinery will produce petrol, diesel, and key petrochemical products used in plastics, packaging, and everyday goods.
This will also help India meet its energy and industrial demand, especially in the southern region. Partnering with Oil India brings in upstream expertise, meaning OIL can help with sourcing and managing crude oil supply.
Not stopping there, BPCL, OIL, and Numaligarh Refinery have also inked a deal to build a 700-km fuel pipeline from Siliguri in West Bengal to Mughalsarai in Uttar Pradesh, worth ₹3,500 crore, to move petrol, diesel, and jet fuel efficiently across eastern India.
In another move toward cleaner energy, BPCL signed an agreement with Fertilisers And Chemicals Travancore (FACT) for trading bio-fertilizers made at its upcoming waste-to-energy plant in Kochi, which will process 150 tonnes of municipal waste daily into biogas and organic maure.
