India Emergency Fuel Storage Reserves
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Tuesday, 09 February 2010 |
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India will complete construction of its first emergency crude oil
storage terminal by the middle of 2011. The tank farm at Visakhapatnam
on the east coast will have a capacity of 1.33 million metric tons, Oil
Secretary S. Sundareshan said.
The emergency storage capacity will rise to 5 million tons when two
more terminals are built at Mangalore on the west coast by 2012, he
said which is the equivalent of two weeks of current imports.
India, which imports 77 percent of its oil needs, is emulating programs
in the U.S., Japan and China to build an emergency stockpile.
India imported 109.32 million tons of oil in the nine months ended Dec.
31, a 12 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the oil
ministry’s Petroleum Planning and Analysis department. Spending to
build three storage terminals was estimated at 24 billion rupees ($514
million) in 2005, excluding the cost of filling the underground caverns
with crude, according to the Web site of Indian Strategic Petroleum
Reserves Ltd., the government company overseeing the construction.
“The storages will be filled at government cost and that may not be the
most economical way of doing it,” Sundareshan said. “We are looking at
various options. Somebody may want to use it as a storage hub.”Overseas
companies may be allowed to lease capacity at the oil terminals in
exchange for supplies, he said. All three facilities are located near
refineries.
Indian refineries are expanding capacity to meet demand in the world’s
second-fastest growing major economy. Mangalore Refinery and
Petrochemicals Ltd. plans to process 15 million tons of crude a year by
2012 from the current 9.69 million tons.
PetrolWorld India 092010 Source: Bloomberg
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