Kochi: Chief Minister Oommen Chandy has called for the early completion of the Integrated Refinery Expansion Project (IREP) of the BPCL Kochi Refinery and sought the help of trade unions to ensure 24-hours working schedule and non-disruption of work at the site.
At review on the project held in his chamber, the chief minister said the work on the Rs 20,000-crore project should pick additional momentum now so that the auto-fuels complying with Euro-IV/Euro-V specifications can be distributed from Kochi Refinery in Kerala from April next year as decided by the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas.
BPCL Kochi Refinery executive director Prasad K Panicker in his presentation on the project said the project has achieved an overall progress of 88 per cent.
The monthly progress rate of the project is 4 per cent while at least 6 per cent progress is required to ensure timely completion, he said.
IREP when complete will increase the refining capacity of Kochi Refinery to 15.5 MMTPA and modernization of refinery to produce auto-fuels complying with Euro-IV/Euro-V specifications.
The units of IREP are designed to be flexible enough to process high sulphur crudes, which will fetch a higher margin.
Delayed coker unit (DCU) of IREP will convert the high sulphur low value bottom products generated from existing refinery and IREP units to petrocoke.
Ports minister K Babu, chief secretary Jiji Thomson, and BPCL chairman and managing director S Varadarajan attended the meeting.
