Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd.’s 42-inch diametre crude oil pipeline from Chennai Port to its Manali refinery is to be commissioned soon.
The refinery’s latest lifeline will replace a 46-year-old 17 km-long pipeline that runs beneath many localities in thickly-populated north Chennai.
CPCL Managing Director S.N. Pandey told The Hindu that all required permissions had been got and that they were ready to take crude oil. “The pipeline with state-of-the-art safety features is mechanically completed. We expect to commission it in December this year. The port side is done and in the plant, all systems are ready to go,” he said.
“The new pipeline has safety aspects including Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA) for monitoring and control during operation, higher pipe thickness, intelligent pigging facility for checking pipeline health condition and corrosion monitoring system,” he added.
Optical fibre cable
The thickness of the pipeline has been increased from 8 mm to 12.7 mm and 17.48 mm. All along the pipeline, an optical fibre cable has been laid so as to provide connectivity between the port and the refinery.
The Manali refinery has a capacity of 10.5 million tonnes per annum and its products include LPG, petrol, diesel, superior kerosene, aviation turbine fuel, naptha, bitumen, lube base stocks, paraffin wax, fuel oil, hexane and linear alkyl benzene and other products. The products are marketed by Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOCL) that is CPCL’s parent company.
The ₹250 crore pipeline project was implemented by IOCL’s Pipeline Division, which took 18 months to complete it. It runs to a large extent along the Ennore Expressway and crosses two railway lines and the Buckingham Canal. The new pipeline has a bigger diameter (42 inch) than the present 30 inch one, which was commissioned in 1969 when the refinery was also commissioned with a capacity of 2.5 million tonnes per annum.
