The Bokaro LPG bottling of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) will be commissioned in December this year, a senior company official said. The Bokaro plant will be the first state of art LPG bottling plant in Jharkhand and will have a capacity of over four million cylinders annually, Chief General Manager (Sales) Vijay Tilak said.

He said the Bokaro LPG bottling plant is being built with an estimated project cost of Rs 93.4 crore. It will bottle 42.3 lakh cylinders annually and will serve all the 24 districts of Jharkhand.

Tilak told PTI that the Bokaro plant of the BPCL will be the 55th LPG bottling plant of the company in the entire country. He said BPCL operationalised its LPG bottling plant at Balangir in Odisha in July and is preparing to commission the LPG bottling plant at Madurai in Tamil Nadu in September.

The company has 4.56mn t/yr of LPG bottling capacity, which accounts for 22 per cent of total Indian capacity. India has 195 bottling plants. BPCL has a customer base of 9.55 lakh households in Jharkhand and 103 domestic LPG distributors. It supply 12,000 cylinders daily in the state.

BPCL has been catering to its customers through the existing private bottling plant at Ranchi and supplies from Durgapur in West Bengal but the increase in the customer base and supply of cylinders are bound to multiply with the commissioning of the new plant at Bokaro, said Tilak.

The CGM told, "BPCL will soon start the commercial production after commissioning of its state of the art new LPG bottling plant at Bokaro by December, 2020. The plant with a single KOSAN carousel of 24 filling stations has an annual capacity of 60 TMT (thousand metric tonnes). This plant with an estimated project cost of Rs. 93.4 crore will bottle 42.3 lakh cylinders annually and serve all the 24 districts of Jharkhand."

He said that with the commissioning of this plant, the dependence on supplies from West Bengal will not be required.

This plant at Bokaro will get its bulk LPG product supply from Haldia by tank lorries. This plant also is provided with three state of the art and safe mounded bullet storage tanks with a capacity of 300 MT each with a total storage capacity of 900 MT Bulk LPG.

Meanwhile, Rajat Bansal, the territory manager of BPCL at Jharkhand told PTI that company met the additional demand which soared post Covid period of April to July, when the demand of LPG cylinders increased by 59.5 per centas compared to the demand during the same period last year.

This challenge of sudden spurt in demand was met by operating the Ranchi plant in additional shifts and taking additional supplies from West Bengal and Bihar. This spurt of demand was mainly because of the additional supply of the 8.7 lakh cylinders under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna during the COVID period of April-July 2020, he said.

Bansal said that BPCL met the demand of three free refills for PMUY Beneficiary under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana Scheme by supplying more than 8.7 lakh cylinders.

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First Published:Sept 1, 2020 12:02 PM IST