Indian Oil Corporation's Panipat petroleum refinery expansion project has advanced with the commissioning of the hydrogen generation unit recently.

The HGU commissioned in the second week of November 2005 is a critical component of the refining capacity expansion project from 6 million tpa to 12 million tpa. With a capacity of 1.4 lakh tpa, it is the largest hydrogen unit in the country and also the largest plant in the world licensed by Haldor Topsoe of Denmark. Larsen & Toubro has constructed the unit on lump-sum turnkey basis, with Engineers India Ltd as project management consultants.

Commissioning activities of other major units of the Rs.4,300 crore refinery expansion project are in full swing. The diesel hydro-treater is scheduled to go on stream by end-November 2005, while the hydrocracker would be commissioned in December 2005. The crude and vacuum distillation units and the delayed coker unit would also be progressively commissioned to achieve overall project commissioning by March 2006.

Doubling of the refining capacity at Panipat will be a major step towards enhancing petroleum product availability in the high-demand north and northwest regions of the country.

Incidentally, the IOC board has already approved further expansion of the Panipat refinery to 15 million tpa.

Two petrochemical units are also coming up at Panipat refinery complex. The first one is an integrated world-scale facility for production of paraxylene/purified terephthalic acid (PTA), the building block for the polyester industry, being set up at a cost of Rs 5,100 crore and scheduled for commissioning by April 2006. The second is a world-scale naphtha cracker with downstream polymer units for production of linear low-density polyethylene , high-density polyethylene , polypropylene and the specialty chemical mono ethylene glycol used in synthetic fibre production along with PTA. The project will be completed by 2007-08.