Indian Oil’s expansion of Digboi refinery under way

Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. (IOC) is progressing with the 350,000-tonne/year (tpy) expansion of its 650,000-tpy Digboi refinery—India’s first and the oldest in the Asia Pacific—located in Tinsukia District of Digboi, in the northeastern region of Assam.

Works to expand Digboi’s refining capacity to 1 million tpy are now under way as part of Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s initiative to revitalize the Digboi and Makum municipalities, Shri Sarbananda Sonowal, India’s Minister of Ports, Shipping & Waterways, said on July 19.

Confirmation of progress on the expansion follows Modi’s official laying of the foundation stone for the project in early March 2024, according to a Mar. 9 release from the prime minister’s office.

While few details have been disclosed about specific works involved as part of the refinery’s expansion, IOC said in its 2023-24 annual report published on July 18 that expansion plans include implementation of the operator’s proprietary indCoker technology, an indigenously developed two-stage cracking process that will be implemented during the project to revamp Digboi’s existing delayed coker to yields of coke while increasing distillate yields from the unit.

Previously slated for completion in October 2025, the proposed project is now scheduled for commissioning in March 2026 at its originally budgeted investment of 7.68 billion rupees, according to the latest official data as of end-June 2024 from India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI).

The project will also include installation of a new furnace heater for the refinery’s delayed coker, as well as installation of a pre-cracker reactor, naphtha stabilizer column, and flash column, MOSPI data shows.

Expansion of the Digboi refinery comes as part of IOC’s broader program of capacity expansions at its refineries to help meet projections for ongoing rising demand for finished petroleum products through at least 2040, the operator said.

Alongside the expansion at Digboi, IOC also is carrying out capacity expansions of its:

• 15-million tpy Panipat refinery to 25 million tpy.
• 13.7-million tpy Gujarat refinery to 18 million tpy.
• 6-million tpy Barauni refinery to 9 million tpy.

By 2030, IOC plans to increase overall crude processing capability of its system to 107.4 million tpy from its current systemwide capacity of 80.8 million tpy, the operator said.

The 2030-capacity goal includes the company’s Cauvery Basin Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd. JV with subsidiary Cauvery Basin Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd. for construction of the grassroots 9-million tpy Cauvery Basin refinery (CBR) at Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu (OGJ Online, Oct 16, 2023).