Panel formed to acquire land for LPG pipeline.

A cross country pipeline project of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. to augment liquefied petroleum gas supplies to the Telugu states is set to move ahead with the oil marketing company informing Telangana government that it wants to start work on the associated facilities by June.

It conveyed this to the government while requesting for constitution of a committee for acquiring private lands. In response, the State Energy Department issued an order a few days ago paving the way for formation of negotiation committee that will have the Joint Collector of the district concerned as the chairman, RDO of the respective division as member and convenor and HPCL’s CGM (Operations), DGM (Procurement and Pipeline Projects) and GM/DGM (Finance) as members.

The committee would be negotiating with owners willing to sell their land for the project under which LPG is to be moved from Hassan in Karnataka to Cherlapalli, near Hyderabad, via Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh. The government order on the committee said the investment proposed on the 680 km pipeline is ₹2,166 crore. Of that ₹771 crore will be invested in Telangana on laying of about 240 km pipeline and related facilities that will improve supply situation with better and timely availability of LPG at the Cherlapalli and other LPG plants.

For the project, land is to be acquired to set up pumping stations, tap off point/pigging stations and sectionalising valve stations in Jogulamba-Gadwal, Wanaparthy, Nagarkurnool, Mahabubnagar, Ranga Reddy and Medchal-Malkajgiri districts. Land is also needed for pipeline stations that will come up at Jedcherla and Thimmapur. While around 15 acres is needed for a station, each of the 16 sectionalising valve stations will need about one acre.

Land purchase for all the proposed stations is very critical for completing the project within stipulated timelines. For expediting the purchase of patta lands by direct negotiations with farmers, HPCL requested for constitution of a negotiation/facilitation committee “so as to start construction by June 2019 after taking possession of these lands,” the G.O. said.

The bottling plants of HPCL, IOC and BPCL near Hyderabad are dependent on the GAIL pipeline from Vishakhapatnam for their LPG supply.

Under the proposed project of HPCL, the product will be moved from its Mangaluru LPG import facility. Hassan is one of the injection points on HPCL’s Mangaluru-Hassan-Mysuru-Sollur LPG pipeline. GAIL had sometime ago objected to the pipeline project.

The HPCL has bottling plants in both Cherlapalli and Anantapur and also plans to supply LPG from Cherlapalli to its facilities in Nagpur and Chandrapur in Maharashtra.

THE HINDU