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Haldia Petchem prepares $10 bln oil-to-chemical task in south India

The Chatterjee Group ( TCG) is in talks with local and international business to partner with its majorityowned petrochemical company Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd (HPL) to develop a more than $10 billion project in southern India, HPL's president said.

The personal equity company plans to build the oil-to-chemical task, capable of producing 3.5 million metric tons each year ( tpy) of ethylene and propylene, at Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu by 2028 to 2029, Haldia CEO Navanit Narayan stated on Monday, including the task is expected to reach financial closure by the end of 2024.

What we are producing as chemicals, we can include more worth to it. There is a big market because the majority of the chemicals we are taking a look at are imported into India. So the margins are much much better, he said.

HPL operates a 1 million tpy petrochemical plant in eastern India and is building the nation's largest integrated phenol project at Haldia.

The company wishes to increase earnings by locally producing specialty chemicals.

In 2021, Haldia took over a moribund oil refinery project in Cuddalore from Nagarjuna Oil that was closed down after damage from a cyclone in 2011. The planned project was set to procedure 120,000 barrels each day of oil.

Indian firms are enhancing their petrochemical production capability as the country's expanding economy raises the need for goods varying from plastics to paints and chemicals such as monoethylene glycol, utilized for making textile fibre and polyester resins.

While India's western part is crowded with petrochemical tasks, the south lacks a large petrochemical project to meet regional need, Narayan said.

So, I think that certainly is a place to be and it's. likewise an extremely economically developed part of the country. We. plainly see that as a benefit, Narayan stated.

India's petrochemical consumption is about one-third of. the worldwide average and the nation relies heavily on imports for. meeting its specialized chemicals requires.

Our assessment is that India requires a cracker of international. scale every 18 months because we are growing at more than 7% -8%. each year as an industry, he stated.

(source: Reuters)