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In a bid to achieve 100 per cent Bharat Stage-IV (BS-IV) fuel production, the Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL), will invest around Rs 1,330 crore in two phases, to complete the conversion from BS-III to a cleaner fuel by the end of this year.
According to the executive director of the refinery, SK Dhar Gupta, the first phase will have investment of Rs 930 crore to revamp diesel hydrotreating units, called DHDT and DHDS. In the second phase, the vaccum gas oil hydrotreating unit, called as VGO-HDT will be revamped. It will require about Rs 390 crore at the refinery, located at Koyali near Vadodara.
"We are in the process of implementing the phase one currently. For the Rs 390-crore phase 2 of the investments, a board approval is due. We have set a target to start supplying BS-IV grade fuel to our marketing terminals by January 2017. It would require 2-3 months for sweeping out the BS-III products from the tanks and pipelines," said Dhar Gupta at the refinery on Friday. According to him, a total Rs 1,330-crore worth of investment will be made to fully convert to BS-IV.
As per the Centre's Auto Fuel Vision & Policy, all vehicles to have BS-IV fuels from April 2017 onwards. As per the BS-IV norms, the sulphur content in diesel will reduce to 50 ppm from 350 ppm in BS-III norm and petrol will have one-third of sulphur content from 150 ppm to 50 ppm, making the fuel cleaner.
"We have also initiated preparations to jump directly from BS-IV to BS-VI fuel by 2020. For this, we will need additional hydrotreating units for both petrol and diesel. It will need additional 50-55 acres of land. A preliminary feasibility report has put the initial investment estimate at Rs 2,770 crore with variation of +/- 30 per cent," Dhar Gupta said adding that the project will be completed by September 2019.
For the BS-VI norms, the sulphur content in petrol and diesel will further be brought down to 10 ppm each.
Dhar Gupta maintained that the refinery throughput stood at 13.82 million tonnes per annum as against the nameplate capacity of 13.7 mtpa. "The refinery's Gross Refining Margin (GRMs) of US $ 6.7 per barrel for fiscal 2015-16 against US $ 4.87 per barrel previous year."
Dhar Gupta further stated that the refinery commissioned a Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant with a capacity of 1250 cubic meters per hour at the cost of around Rs 160 crore. Set-up in 14 months, the RO plant will reuse water in the refinery.
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