State-owned Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd plans to invest Rs13,000 crore to double the annual capacity of Visakhapatnam refinery to 15 million tonnes by 2013, chairman and managing director S Roy Choudhury said on Monday.
“We are doing a detailed feasibility report for expanding the capacity of our existing refinery in Vizag,” he said.
The Visakhapatnam refinery has an installed capacity of 7.5 million tonnes per year, but operates at 8.3 million tonnes.
The expansion of the existing refinery comes after another proposal to build a 15 million tonnes refinery in Visakhapatnam along with four other partners got derailed after the exit of Lakshmi Mittal, one of the richest Indians and chief of the ArcelorMittal group and French oil giant Total SA.
“That project is on freeze. We are now looking at increasing our existing Vizag refinery capacity,” he said. The company has already acquired land for the expansion, said another official close to the development. “We are also looking at replacing an old CDU (crude distillation unit) at Vizag with a bigger CDU of around 9 million tonnes,” Roy Choudhury said.
Lets hope this will bring new jobs to the city within the next 2 years.
