Published on August 9, 2017

Indian Oil Corp board has agreed Rs 15,034 crore investment to swell its Gujarat refinery by 2022.

Expansion of capacity of refinery at Vadodara will help to fulfill the mounting order for products in the region. The wxpansion will be 18 million tons from existing 13.7 million tons.

IOC Chairman Sanjiv Singh said the new refinery configuration proposed will take into account the likely disruptions in the fuel supply-demand scenario in the future and will have built-in flexibility in its operations for strong integration with downstream petrochemical units.

IOC is planning to incorporate its own R&D technologies for both IndMax and kerosene hydrodesulphurisation units. The IndMax unit is being designed for high yields of propylene, for which a polypropylene unit of 420,000 tons capacity is being set up as a downstream petrochemical unit as part of the refinery configuration.

IOC is in plan to elevate the combined capacity of its 11 group refineries from 80.7 million tons a year to over 100 million tons in the coming five years through brownfield expansions. It is also pursuing a 60 million tons integrated refinery-cum-petrochemicals project on the west coast jointly with other Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL).