ADNOC has signed an MoU with the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL) to explore the possibility of storing crude oil at ISPRL’s 2.5-million-tonne underground oil storage facility at Padur in Karnataka. Under the MoU ADNOC could store crude in two compartments at Padur.
The MoU with ISPRL, an Indian government-owned company mandated to store crude oil for emergency needs, follows the arrival, on November 4, of the final shipment of the initial delivery of ADNOC crude to be stored in another ISPRL underground facility at Mangalore, also in Karnataka, which will store 5.86 million barrels of ADNOC crude oil.
ADNOC is the only foreign oil and gas company, so far, to invest by way of crude oil in India’s strategic petroleum reserves programme. It is also a stakeholder, along with Saudi Aramco, and a consortium of Indian state-run companies, in one of India’s largest refinery and petrochemicals complexes, to be constructed at Ratnagiri in Maharashtra.
In addition to ADNOC’s stake in the Ratnagiri refinery, the hydrocarbon linkages between the UAE and India were bolstered in February 2018 when an Indian consortium of three companies, comprising ONGC Videsh, Indian Oil Company and Bharat PetroResources Ltd., was awarded a 10 percent participating interest in Abu Dhabi’s offshore Lower Zakum concession.
ISPRL has already built 5.33 million tonnes of underground storage capacity at three locations, Visakhapatnam (1.33 million tonnes), Mangalore (1.5 million tonnes) and Padur (2.5 million tonnes), that can meet around 10 days of the country’s oil needs. The government of India, in June 2018, announced the creation of two new reserves, a 4 million tonnes storage facility at Chandikhol, in the eastern state of Odisha, and an additional 2.5 million-tonne facility at Padur.
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