IOC has requested land from Haldia Fertilizer Corporation (HFC). (File)
Calcutta:
Oil marketing PSU Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) wants to convert its existing refinery at Haldia in West Bengal into a petrochemical complex “to support profitable operations”, a company official said on Wednesday.
The management of a private oil refinery is “unsustainable from the point of view of profitability”, he said, for which it should be supplemented with a petrochemical complex.
“We want to build a petrochemical complex adjacent to the Haldia refinery, which currently has a capacity of 8.5 million tonnes per annum (mtpa),” a company spokesperson said.
IOC has sought land from Haldia Fertilizer Corporation (HFC), whose plant is defunct, to develop the petrochemical complex, he said.
“We have sought 175 acres of land from HFC. It is close to the refinery and Haldia Dock Complex (HDC) has been leased to the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers. We are looking for land for a petrochemical project,” an IOC official said.
Drawing an analogy, the official said that IOC’s Paradip Refinery has become a petroleum, chemical and petrochemical investment zone.
“The Paradip refinery has a capacity of 15 million tonnes and has many petrochemical units around it. This gives good profit margins to Paradip’s operations. This is something IOC wants to replicate in Haldia,” he added.
According to the official, the capacity of the petrochemical project depends on the amount of raw materials coming from the refinery.
According to him, this place is also needed for security reasons as the refinery complex in Haldia is congested.
When asked, an IOC official said, “Several talks have been held with HDC, but nothing has materialized so far.”
An HDC official said, “The land can be used only for port-related uses like facilitating export-import cargo. We have informed the authorities about this at the Centre.”
During the recent visit of Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Rameswar Teli to the Haldia Refinery, he said that the IOC had informed him about the HFC land issue.
While the Paradip refinery complex is built on 5,000 acres, the Haldia unit is on 640 acres, the IOC official added.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and was published on a syndicated channel.)
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