Gail India, the country’s leading gas Transportation Company is planning to double the capacity of its petrochemical subsidiary Brahmaputra Cracker and Polymer Limited (BCPL) in Assam. Gail has already commissioned a study for doubling the firm’s petrochemical capacity, B C Tripathi, CMD had said at a recent press conference.
BCPL, which was born out of the Assam Accord of August 1985, has been a long time in the making and was finally commissioned in 2016. Tripathi said the plant operated at 107 per cent capacity last fiscal and is currently running at 110 per cent capacity. The plant had suffered low capacity utilization clocking just 37 percent in fiscal 2017, and 78 per cent in 2018. “It started as a sub-optimal capacity plant, more as a social objective... Feedstock problems have been ironed out. It has turned to profit... this year onwards, expect it to make regular profits of Rs. 2 billion plus,” Tripathi said.
Natural gas supply from Oil and Natural Gas Corporation were also started in February 2017, after the connecting pipeline came on stream in December 2016. The required quantity of naphtha is being supplied by Numaligarh Refinery Ltd., said CRISIL in a ratings report. Gail is also building a natural gas pipeline from Barauni to Guwahati.
BCPL’s expansion would ride on the capacity enhancement planned at the Numaligarh Refinery. In January, the Cabinet approved an Rs.225.94 billion capacity expansion from 3 MMTPA to 9 MMTPA which is expected to be completed in four years. The refinery expansion had also been delayed for a long while to the crude oil supply issue, which has now been taken care of through a proposed pipeline from Paradip in Odisha to Numaligarh. BCPL currently has a capacity to produce 220,000 tonnes per annum of polyethylene (PE) products, and 60,000 TPA of polypropylene (PP).
