BPCL’s Kochi refinery exports India’s first IMO 2020-compliant VLSFO
India’s state-owned Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (BPCL) has become India’s first exporter of very low-sulfur fuel oil (VLSFO) that complies with the International Marine Organization’s (IMO) new regulations requiring ships to use marine fuels with a sulfur content below 0.5%.
BPCL shipped its first 15,000-tonnes parcel of IMO 2020-grade VLSFO from its 15.5 million-tonne/year (tpy) Kochi refinery at Ambalamugal, Ernakulam district, in the Indian state of Kerala, to an undisclosed buyer in Singapore on Feb. 7, the operator said in a Feb. 10 release.
“VLSFO is an IMO 2020-compliant marine fuel, and in view of [the] emerging market for VLSFO, [the] Kochi refinery started production [beginning in] December 2019. We also started supplying VLSFO to the tankers calling at Kochi [in December],” said P. Murall Madhavan, BPCL’s executive director for the Kochi refinery.
Manufactured to comply with IMO’s more stringent standards aimed at preventing pollution from marine and shipping operations that took effect Jan. 1, VLSFO is produced mainly using the vacuum residue of low-sulfur crudes with suitable blending streams.
“Now that the global demand is increasing, we have [started] exports of VLSFO, after saturating indigenous demands. The first export that was flagged off from Kochi also marks the first export from the country by any oil marketing company in India,” said Madhavan.
Kochi IREC project
Announcement of the Kochi refinery’s first VLSFO export follows the operator’s late-January 2019 ceremony celebrating laying of the foundation stone for a project to build an integrated petrochemical complex at the refinery that, once completed, will transform the Kochi manufacturing site into India’s largest public sector unit refinery, BPCL said in a Jan. 29, 2019, release.
Aimed at reducing India’s dependence on chemical imports, the integrated refinery expansion complex (IREC) at Kochi will double the site’s production of LPG and diesel, as well as enable production of feedstock for petrochemical projects at the plant, BPCL said.
The proposed IREC petrochemical complex at Kochi is scheduled to come on stream sometime during 2023-24.
Last year, BPCL let a contract to Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd. to provide licensing for its proprietary technology to be used in a 300,000-tpy propylene oxide (PO) plant included in the large-scale IREC petrochemical project, which will be located adjacent to the existing Kochi refinery complex (OGJ Online, Aug. 19, 2019).
Most recently, BPCL let a contract to Fluor Corp. to provide project management consultancy services for a polyols petrochemicals plant to be built as part of Kochi’s IREC (OGJ Online, Jan. 28, 2020).
Fluor’s scope of work includes front-end engineering and design of both the inside and outside battery limits as well as detailed design, engineering, procurement, and construction management services for the project’s utilities and off sites.
Six new process units will be built and integrated into the existing refinery as part of the 111.3 billion-rupee project, which alongside the polyols and PO units, include a propylene glycol unit, ethylene oxide-monoethylene glycol unit, ethylene recovery unit, and cumene unit. Once completed, the new Kochi complex will produce propylene glycol, ethylene glycol, and various grades of polyols based on a feedstock of 250,000 tpy of polymer-grade propylene.
BPCL also is currently implementing a project to expand production of cleaner fuels at the Kochi refinery to ensure compliance with India’s more-stringent Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI, equivalent to Euro 6) low-sulfur emissions standards for fuels that, upon taking effect in April 2020, will mandate a maximum sulfur content of 10 ppm (OGJ Online, Mar. 12, 2019).
To be completed in two phases, the 32.89 billion-rupee BS-VI Motor Spirit Block project (MSBP) at Kochi is designed to upgrade surplus naphtha produced at the refinery into fuels meeting BS-VI specifications, according to BPCL’s website.
While BPCL’s latest annual report to investors released in 2019 indicated units for production of BS-VI MS would be completed by February 2020 and remaining units for upgrading naphtha to BS VI-quality fuel by June 2020, the Kochi refinery now will begin supplying diesel and MS conforming to BS-VI standards as of Mar. 1, with the entirety of the MSBP to be completed sometime during second-half 2020, Madhavan said in a January BPCL Kochi publication.
Robert Brelsford | Downstream Editor
Robert Brelsford joined Oil & Gas Journal in October 2013 as downstream technology editor after 8 years as a crude oil price and news reporter on spot crude transactions at the US Gulf Coast, West Coast, Canadian, and Latin American markets. He holds a BA (2000) in English from Rice University and an MS (2003) in education and social policy from Northwestern University.
