Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. (IOC) has let a contract to Chevron Lummus Global (CLG)—a Chevron USA Inc.-Lummus Technology JV—to license process technologies for units involved in the lube-petrochemical (Lupech) portion of its previously announced and long-planned project that will expand crude oil processing capacity of its 13.7 million-tonne/year (tpy) Koyali refinery at Vadodara in India’s western state of Gujarat (OGJ Online, Nov. 16, 2011).
As part of the early September contract, CLG will license proprietary technologies, equipment, and catalyst for a grassroots catalytic dewaxing unit and revamp of an existing hydrocracker as part of Lupech project, which aims to increase the refinery’s production of premium base oils to help reduce India’s reliance imports from abroad, CLG said.
Alongside equipping the new 270,000-tpy catalytic dewaxing unit with its two-step all-hydroprocessing technology to selectively concentrate and isomerize the molecular structure of wax into isoparaffins at high yields, CLG said it will modernize and expand the refinery’s existing 1.2-million tpy hydrocracker to produce 1.55 million tpy of feedstock for production of API Groups II and III base oils to meet increased market demand.
The latest contract follows IOC’s October 2020 approval of the Lupech element of its revised 178.25-billion rupee expansion and Lupech integration project to increase crude processing capacity of the Gujarat refinery by 4.3 million tpy to 18 million tpy as well as result in proposed production of 500,000 tpy of polypropylene and 235,000 tpy of lube oil base stock at the site (OGJ Online, Oct. 20, 2020).
Inclusion of the Lupech component comes as part of IOC’s strategy to create a building block for future production of niche chemicals with a potential to increase petrochemical and specialty products integration index on incremental crude throughput to improve margins, IOC said.
Designed to improve 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 (OGJ Online, Aug. 8, 2017).
IOC—which in 2020 completed its Bharat Stage (BS) 4 and BS 6-grade (equivalent to Euro 5 and Euro 6-quality) fuels to enable Gujarat to produce Bharat Stage (BS) 4 and BS 6-grade (equivalent to Euro 5 and Euro 6-quality) fuels in line with the Indian government’s Auto Fuel Policy 2025 calling for 100% BS 6-quality fuel production—now plans to fully commission the long-awaited expansion and accompanying BS 6 fuel upgrading projects at the refinery during 2024-25, the operator said in its recently released 2020-21 annual report to investors.
