India's IOC awards pipeline contract to Iranian company

Shirish Nadkarni
OGJ Correspondent

MUMBAI, Jan. 3 ¿ India's state-owned Indian Oil Corp. has awarded a contract to Iranian Offshore Engineering & Construction Co., Tehran, to lay a 22-km subsea pipeline to shore from a proposed single point mooring buoy (SPM) off Paradip Port at Orissa on India's eastern coast.

The SPM will offload large crude carriers with full loads. The pipeline initially will transport crude from the buoy to the Haldia refinery and subsequently to a 12 million tonne/year (t/y) capacity refinery planned for Paradip.

Construction on the subsea pipeline, to begin this month, is expected to take 6 months, according to Paradip Port Trust (PPT) sources. IOC, however, has yet to start work on a Paradip-Haldia crude oil pipeline.

Paradip port, which currently handles about 1.4 million t/y of petroleum products but handles no crude traffic, expects to start moving 5 million t/y of crude oil from the SPM in 2005-06 and 15 million t/y during a full year of operation.

The port trust already has completed an $11.4 million oil jetty, which has yet to be commissioned. The jetty has a draught of 12.7 m, ideally suited for "LR-I" crude oil tankers having a capacity as great as 65,000 dwt. The jetty will be operational shortly, port trust sources indicated.

Drilling programs
Meanwhile, India's state-owned Oil & Natural Gas Corp. has sought port trust assistance in drilling 21 wells in the Mahanadi basin and four wells on Sagar Island.

PPT has agreed to provide sheds, open space, and berthing facilities for the vessels to facilitate a 4-year drilling program, scheduled to start in early 2005.

The port has extended similar facilities to Mumbai-based Reliance Industries Ltd., which has been drilling off Paradip for the past 1.5 years.