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Oil jetty commissioned in Nagapattinam

By Our Staff Reporter

Nagapattinam March.1. The commissioning of its oil jetty at the port here today provides Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) several advantages including an ability to meet the growing demand for petroleum products in the hinterland of the State.

The 1-million tonne (MT) refinery of the IOC group company at Panangudi (Cauvery Basin Refinery), established in 1993 with a 0.5 MT capacity primarily to process the local Narimanam crude, today is on verge of becoming an exporter of petroleum products.

The IOC and CPCL Chairman, M. S. Ramachandran, said the oil jetty would result in "saturating the demand (for petroleum products) in the hinterland of Tamil Nadu such as Villupuram and Tiruchi". Speaking at a function, in which the Union Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister, Ram Naik, inaugurated the oil jetty, he said the refinery products were already being exported to Sri Lanka under an agreement between the IOC and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC).

There were also possibilities of the products being exported through the IOC to other South East Asian nations. The CPCL would complete its three million tonne refinery expansion project at Manali, near Chennai, by "the end of this year", he said, adding "we have already chalked out plans for disposal (marketing) of the excess capacity".

The CPCL managing director, S.V. Narasimhan, said commissioning of the oil jetty would mean an end to the transportation of crude from the PY-3 oil fields near Pondicherry to Chennai by sea and then by road tankers to Panangudi. "At least 80-100 road tankers were engaged in transporting the crude to the refinery" and such movements were potentially unsafe and costly.

The company stood to save on the road transportation cost of around Rs.13 crores annually as the jetty, built at a water depth of 7.5 metres and connected from the shore by a 1.4- km long motorable trestle, had the capacity to receive 15,000 tonnes of crude from a partially loaded 40,000 DWT (dead weight tonnage) vessel.

A cross-country 8.3 kilometre pipeline would carry the crude oil receipts from the jetty to the refinery. The former Chairman and Managing Director of CPCL, S. Rammohan, said the jetty was necessitated as the Oil Coordination Committee (OCC), which used to reimburse the cost of transporting the crude (from Chennai to Panangudi) had been dismantled along with the administered pricing mechanism for petroleum products.

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