The Indian Oil Corporation’s (IOCL) bottling plant in Cherlapally, Telangana, is geared to cater to growing demand for new, differentiated LPG cylinders for commercial applications such as XtraTej that IOCL had launched recently.
The plant had already shifted to filling 47.5 kg cylinders only with XtraTej.
The dosing facility at the plant is operational and in need for some more fine-tuning.
This plant has one Flexspeed Carousel of 72 filling points of Kosan Crisplant make. The Carousal is one of its kind in IndianOil with high-speed filling capacity of 4,000 cylinders per hour (14.2 kg) and has three stage filling for better accuracy.
Installation of vision readers and integrated weight correction units in the Carousel facilitates filling of refill cylinders to precise weight and hence benefits customers.
The plant can churn out 3,900 LPG cylinders per hour. The bottling plant is equipped with 1,500 kVA captive power generation capacity through three diesel generators for seamless and uninterrupted filling.
Remote monitoring of valve leak detectors, O ring leak detectors and hot air sealing units as part of automation in the plant ensures that practically defect- free cylinders reach homes of Indane customers.
The plant can fill the regular 14.2 kg and five kg cylinders for domestic use, 19 kg and 47.5 kg XtraTej differentiated LPG for commercial applications and 19 kg Nanocut cylinders for precision cutting industrial application. The plant can deliver bulk LPG/propane for large scale applications.
The facility is a mainstay for IOCL in catering to its customer base of 57 lakh in Telangana through 352 distributors.
The bottling plant, located on a little over 32 acre, fills around 55,000 LPG cylinders per day, translating into an annual bottling capacity of 1.80 lakh tonne.
The LPG storage capacity is 2,300 tonne in the form of six above-ground bullets, with a combined capacity of 900 tonne, and one Horton sphere with a capacity of 1,400 tonne.
There are plans to establish additional LPG tankage of 2,400 tonne in mounded storage.
Besides the facility, IOCL has another bottling plant in Thimmapur, much of whose requirement of bulk LPG is supplied from Cherlapally, which in turn receives the fuel on a pipeline from Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.
The Cherlapally plant supplies LPG cylinders to customers through a network of over 300 Indane LPG distributors across Telangana, excluding Mahabubnagar, and auto LPG to all the outlets in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
IndianOil has 91 bottling plants like Cherlapally across the country, rolling out two million cylinders a day.