MOSCOW (MRC) -- Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals (MRPL), the downstream subsidiary of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) is planning to make an investment of Rs 31,073 crore to undertake expansion, said Projectstoday.
MRPL will expand its flagship 16 million tpa refinery to 18 million tpa and focus on integration of production streams for petrochemicals like ethylene, propylene and butane.
The project is currently facing challenges including processing of heavier and sulphur rich crude, strict environmental regulations, enhanced product specifications for sulphur and aromatics, evolving regional supply and demand dynamics for diesel versus petrol, among others.
MRPL also plans to undertake capacity expansion of its second crude oil distillation unit (CDU) to 9.7 million tpa from 7.2 million tpa currently, conversion of visbreaker (VBU) into a 0.7 million tpa CDU for swing operations for processing high sulphur or heavy crude directly and utilisation of CDU-I and CDU-III at present capacities.
The idea is to utilise maximum crude processing capacity available in primary units. MRPL processes over 17 grades of crude and mainly relies on 4,117 kilo tpa of Iran Heavy, Arab Heavy (3,520 kilo tpa), Mangala (2,015 kilo tpa), Das blend (1,245 kilo tpa), Mumbai High (1,100 kilo tpa), and Soroosh crude (738 kilo tpa), among others.
The proposed hybrid configuration indicates that the company will increase its reliance on seven crude grades including Arab Heavy (5,000 kilo tpa), Soroosh crude (3,000 kilo tpa), Iran Heavy (2,000 kilo tpa), Mangala (2,000 kilo tpa), Arab Light (2,000 kilo tpa), Basrah Light (2,000 kilo tpa), Basrah Heavy (1,500 kilo tpa) and Merey crude (500 kilo tpa).
The company has already started petrochemical production by adding a polypropylene unit and the current refinery complex is integrated to an aromatic complex designed to produce 9,00,000 tpa of paraxylene.
As MRC informed earlier, in September 2019, MRPL restarted operations at the refinery with downstream units after scheduled maintenance works.
As MRC wrote before, in June 2015, MRPL successfully commenced commercial production of PP from its polypropylene plant as part of its phase-III refinery expansion and upgradation project in Mangaluru. The plant has a capacity to produce 4,40,000 tonnes of PP per annum. Feedstock for the PP plant - polymer grade propylene - is being produced from upstream petrochemical fluidised catalytic cracking unit of the refinery. Technology provider for the PP plant is Novolen of Germany. The plant has been engineered and constructed by Engineers India Ltd.
Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL), is an oil refinery at Mangalore and is a subsidiary of ONGC, set up in 1993. The refinery is located at Katipalla, north from centre of Mangalore city. The refinery was established after displacing five villages of Bala, Kalavar, Kuthetoor, Katipalla, and Adyapadi.
MRC