Indian Oil completes LPG pipeline in N India

New Delhi: Indian Oil Corporation (Indian Oil) has completed the commissioning of its first cross-country liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) pipeline in North India, between Panipat and Jalandhar.

The pipeline was completed at a total cost of Rs 158 crore as against an approved cost of Rs 186.72 crore.

The commissioning was completed with delivery of LPG to IOC’s Jalandhar terminal. The Panipat-Nabha section of the pipeline has already been commissioned on November 13 with delivery to IOC’s Nabha terminal. According to the company, the overall savings in the distribution cost of LPG due to the pipeline areestimated to be annually about Rs 35 crore.

The other intangible savings would be in the form of reliability, lower transit losses and safety in road transportation, he said. With this commissioning, IOC has joined the select group of companies which own and operate LPG pipelines.

According to the company, the total length of the pipeline network, including crude oil and product pipelines, has now gone up to about 9,600 km. IOC plans to add about 4,000 km of new pipelines by the end of the Eleventh Plan period (2007-12). Of these, about 1,150 km length of pipeline is being commissioned in the current fiscal.

The 275-km Panipat-Jalandhar LPG pipeline has an intermediate delivery station for feeding IOC’s LPG bottling plant at Nabha (near Patiala). It has been designed for an initial capacity of 0.7 million tonnes a year to optimally transport LPG from Panipat to Nabha and Jalandhar on a long-term basis and meet the LPG requirements of IOC’s bottling plants at Jalandhar and Nabha in Punjab, at Una and Baddi in Himachal Pradesh and at Jammu and Leh in Jammu & Kashmir.

Till now, LPG produced at IOC’s Panipat refinery was being transferred through a 7-km pipeline to its bottling plant at Kohand. After meeting the requirement at Kohand LPG bottling plant, the balance product was being despatched to other bottling plants at Nabha, Jalandhar, Jammu etc., by road through ‘bullet trucks’.

“The Panipat-Jalandhar LPG pipeline system has been implemented in-house by IOC’s Pipelines Division, which has the expertise to undertake cross-country pipeline projects from concept to commissioning,” the statement said.