Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. (IOC) is moving forward with the first phase of a long-planned project to expand crude oil processing capacity of its 13.7 million-tonne/year Koyali refinery at Vadodara in India’s western state of Gujarat (OGJ Online, Nov. 16, 2011).
Approved by the company’s board at its Aug. 3 meeting, the 150.3-billion rupee expansion will increase the refinery’s total processing capacity by 4.3 million tpy to 18 million tpy by yearend 2022, IOC said.
Scheduled to be completed in second-half 2021, Stage 1 of the project will involve construction and startup of a 15 million-tpy atmospheric-vacuum distillation unit (AVDU) and associated utilities to replace several of the refinery’s smaller and outdated primary processing units, including four atmospheric distillation and two vacuum distillation units.
About a year after commissioning the AVDU, IOC said it will enter other secondary downstream processing units into service as part of the expansion.
Alongside improving the refinery’s energy performance as well as its ability to meet growing regional demand for finished products, the expansion and reconfiguration project also aims to equip the plant with greater flexibility to weather future disruptions in the supply-demand scenario and more closely integrate its production with downstream petrochemical units, according to IOC Chairman Sanjiv Singh.
In addition to incorporating an INDMAX fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) designed for high yields of propylene to feed a 420,000-tpy polypropylene planned as a downstream petrochemical unit under the expansion, IOC also is considering adding a kerosine hydrodesulfurization unit as part of the project, Singh said.
The Koyali expansion joins IOC’s broader plans during the next 5 years to boost overall capacity of its 11 refineries to more than 100 million tpy from the current 80.7 million tpy through exclusively brownfield expansions, the company said.
Additional projects
IOC also recently was granted environmental clearance from India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change (EFCC) to carry out projects at Koyali that will enable the refinery to produce Bharat Stage (BS) 4 and BS 6-grade (equivalent to Euro 5 and Euro 6-quality) fuels, according to a Mar. 20 approval letter from EFCC.
Scheduled to be commissioned between September 2019 and April 2020, the two projects are designed to bring the refinery’s fuel production in line with the Indian government’s decision to leapfrog directly to BS 6 compliance by Apr. 1, 2020 (OGJ Online, Apr. 4, 2017).
Already under way, the 9.3-billion rupee BS 4 and 27.7-billion rupee BS 6 projects will involve the following:
• Expand existing 2.20 million-tpy diesel hydrotreating unit to 2.86 million tpy.
• Expand existing 1.77 million-tpy diesel HDS unit to 2.2 million tpy.
• Expand existing 2.1 million-tpy vacuum gas oil hydrotreating unit to 2.2 million tpy.
• Installation of a 55-tonne/hr sour water stripper.
• Installation of a 2 million-tpy diesel hydrotreating unit.
• Installation of a 72,500-tpy hydrogen generation unit.
• Installation of a 700,000-tpy FCC gasoline desulfurization unit.
• Installation of a 190-tonne/hr amine regeneration unit.
• Expand existing 600,000-tpy continuous catalytic reforming unit to 780,000 tpy.
• Expand existing 230,000-tpy isomerization unit to 276,000 tpy.
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].
