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Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (CPCL), Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOCL) and seed equity partners have signed a joint venture agreement for the upcoming grassroot 9 million tonne per annum (MMTPA) refinery at Nagapattinam.
The agreement was signed in New Delhi in the presence of S.M. Vaidya, Chairman, IOCL, and Arvind Kumar, Managing Director, CPCL among others. H. Shankar, Director (Technical), CPCL, and Rajiv Kacker, Executive Director (Projects), RHQ, IOCL, are signatories to the agreement.
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Indian Oil and CPCL, which is its subsidiary, will together hold 50% of equity stake (25% each) in the joint venture and the balance 50% stake would be held by financial/strategic Investors, to be identified later. Pending onboarding of the Financial/Strategic investor, the JVC is being incorporated with the two companies.
An older smaller refinery with a capacity of 0.5 MMPTA set up in 1993 and later upgraded to 1 MMTPA at Nagapattinam has been dismantled and it is in its place that the 9 MMTPA refinery that will push growth in the south of Tamil Nadu is coming up.
The project is planned to be completed in 45 months by June 2025. In all, 606 acres of land adjoining the existing land parcel has been acquired for the project.
The State government issued a GO for the same last year. Necessary statutory approvals for the project implementation, including environmental clearance and consent to establish, have been obtained. About 80% of material for the refinery would be sourced indigenously.
The refinery will produce LPG, BS VI quality petrol, diesel and aviation turbine fuel (ATF). A single point mooring about 19 km into the sea and desalination plant have been planned for crude import and refinery water requirement respectively. The power and steam requirement for the refinery will be met by captive generation using environment friendly re-gasified liquid natural gas as fuel. This would be CPCL’s second refinery, the first one being in Manali that has a capacity of 10.5 MMTPA.