Chandigarh, Sep 9 (Inditop.com) HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd (HMEL), a joint venture between the state-owned Hindustan Petroleum Corp and Mittal Energy Investment of Singapore, Wednesday said the carriage capacity of the Sri Guru Gobind Singh oil refinery’s Gujarat-Bathinda pipeline is being doubled.
This will make the upcoming complex at Bathinda the biggest petrochemical hub in Asia, it said.
HMEL officials told the Punjab government that the pipeline’s annual carriage capacity, initially envisaged at 9,000 million tonnes, is being doubled to 18,000 million tonnes.
“This was being done to expand the refinery into Asia’s biggest petrochemical hub”, HMEL officials said.
HMEL chairman Arun Balakrishnan and chief executive Prabh Das Wednesday met Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and other top officials of the state government here.
Das said apart from the Rs.18,900 crore initial outlay for the refinery, an additional Rs.5,000 crore was being spent on the Gujarat-Bathinda pipeline and another Rs.1,000 crore on an offshore port for importing crude oil from Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
According to him, Rs.12-15 crore was being spent on the refinery everyday, and that 40 percent of the work had been completed.
The refinery, located 260 km from here, is likely to go into production before schedule in 2011, he added.
HMEL officials said a downstream Rs.5,000-crore poly-propylene based unit would also be set up.
Over 200 units would come up around the refinery with employment potential for over 10,000 people. This would be apart from the jobs created at the refinery.
Das also requested the chief minister to prevail upon the central government to either grant special industrial incentives to Punjab or to withdraw that being given to units in neighbouring states.
