MANGALORE: India's strategic oil reserves capacity is set for additional 45-day buffer when the second phase of cavern storage facilities is put in place.
At present, India has 70 days of oil reserves in various strategic locations. A 15-day buffer will be added to the same when the three oil caverns of Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd - at Mangalore
SEZ and Paddur near Udupi and Visakhapatnam - are operational by August 2014.
The second phase of strategic oil reserves for which a detailed project report has been prepared will be set up at Bikaner in Rajasthan, Padur near Udupi in Karnataka, Rajkot in Gujarat and Chandipur in Odisha. While facilities at Bikaner, Padur and Chandipur will be underground rock caverns, the facility at Rajkot will be concrete cavern. These proposed facilities put together can store around 12.5 million tonnes of reserve crude and oil products.
Disclosing this to STOI in an informal chat here, L N Gupta, secretary, Oil Industry Development Board (OIDB), that is funding the phase I of the project with a stated reserve capacity of 5 million tones, said the proposed facilities will be 2.5 times the current project size. Going by the thumb rule that the three storage facilities can store crude reserves for 15 days, he said the new facilities will be able to store crude for around 40 days.
Noting that the work on oil reserve facilities at Vishakapatnam, Paddur and Mangalore SEZ are on track, Gupta said the Visakhapatnam facility will store 1.33 million tonnes, Mangalore SEZ 1.50 million tonnes and Padur 2.50 million tonnes. OIDB thus far has incurred an expenditure of Rs 2,500 crore out of estimated capital cost of Rs 4,000 crore, he said, adding that an additional Rs 25,000 crore is needed for the crude that will be stored in these three caverns.
Source : articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com