Date:26/04/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/04/26/stories/2008042654600600.htm

Andhra Pradesh

Work on India’s first crude oil cavern launched

Santosh Patnaik

The Rs. 375-crore project being undertaken by HCC will be completed in 36 months

Photo: K.R. Deepak

Prestigious venture: Drilling in progress to build the underground cavern in Visakhapatnam on Friday. —

VISAKHAPATNAM: The maiden trial blast at Lova Gardens marked the launching of India’s first underground rock cavern for strategic storage of crude oil by the Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) here on Friday.

CEO Rajan K. Pillai and CFO M.C. Singh of Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited (ISPRL), Project Controller C.P. Ramesh, S. Malkani of Engineers India Ltd. (EIL) and others celebrated the historic event with distribution of sweets.

After the blast and a siren, they studied the rock strata and calculated the time cycle of drilling and blasting. The prestigious project, awarded to the HCC on January 16 by ISPRL, would be completed in 36 months. The Rs.375-crore cavern would have a storage capacity of 1.33 million tonnes. EIL was the project management consultant.

Buffer stock

The Vizag project was the first among three underground caverns proposed by the ISPRL with a storage capacity of five million tonnes. Two other caverns would come up at Mangalore and Padur. ISPRL is a subsidiary of Oil Industry Development Board. The buffer stock of crude will help various areas in the event of emergencies. All the refineries in the country together have reserves to meet the requirement for three weeks. The cavern projects to be operated by ISPRL, set up by the Union Government, will be of immense help whenever there is steep increase in international prices. The crude imported from the Middle East annually is valued at Rs.80,000 crores.

HCC record

HCC has rich experience in underground construction, mainly in geologically complex terrain. It is credited with building India’s first major underground power house for Yamuna hydel project in the Himalayan region.

The cavern project in the city will be located under a hill having maximum elevation of 130 metres. The floor of the cavern is 60m below mean sea level.

Two large shafts, 90m deep, will be built to house the operating equipment for the cavern. The crude cavern is also close to South Asia’s first LPG cavern project, which was commissioned early this year.