The Hindu : Chennai Petro's expansion nearing completion

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 01, 2003

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Business

Chennai Petro's expansion nearing completion

By Our Corporate Reporter

CHENNAI JUNE 30. Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) has made good progress in the implementation of its three million tonnes expansion-cum-modernisation project. Addressing visiting presspersons at the Manali complex here today, S. V. Narasimhan, Managing Director of the company, said the project would be mechanically completed by July excepting for the hydrocracker unit which was scheduled to be completed by September this year. The project was approved by the Union Government in July 2000 at an estimated cost of Rs. 2,360.38 crores, including a foreign exchange component of Rs. 333.82 crores with a completion schedule of 36 months, Mr. Narasimhan said. It would be fully operational by December without any cost overrun, he said.

Apart from the crude and vacuum units, the major secondary processing plants included the hydrocracker unit, naphtha hydrotreating and catalytic reforming units and visbreker unit for resid upgradation. The products turned out would be comforming to Bharat stage II and Euro III equivalent specifications, Mr. Narasimhan said.

Explaining the process involved, R. Anand, DGM (projects), said the hydrocracker unit had been designed to process vacuum distillates both from the existing and expansion refineries and the unconverted oil from the hydrockracker would be routed as feed to the existing secondary processing unit, namely fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU). This would improve both the yield and quality of products from the FCCU and reduce environmental emissions, he said.

According to R. Sankaran, director (technical), the process units in the expansion projects had been designed to process a wide range of low sulphur and high sulphur crudes.

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