Reliance Petroleum Ltd Refinery and Petrochemical Complex, Jamnagar, India

At the end of December 2005 Reliance Petroleum Ltd (RPL) announced that it had begun work on building a refinery and petrochemical complex in Jamnagar, Gujarat, India. RPL is a subsidiary of India's Reliance Industries.

The refinery has a capacity of 580,000bpd and a polypropylene (PP) plant has a capacity of 900,000tpa. In August 2007 RPL announced it was to build a new 900,000tpa polypropylene plant adjacent to the Jamnagar Integrated Petrochemical Complex in Gujarat.

The PP is produced using propylene feedstock from the refinery complex. The complex, said to be the most advanced in the world, became operational in December 2008.

Financing of Jamnagar complex

The refinery and PP plant required an investment of $6bn. During the first half of 2006 RPL completed the equity financing of the project through an initial public offering syndicated foreign currency loan facilities. The Export Import Bank of the United States provided a $500m loan guarantee.

Polypropylene (PP) plant project management

During August 2007 Aker Kvaerner announced that it had been awarded a contract to provide project management, procurement and engineering services for RPL's 900,000tpa PP plant, which was being built in Jamnagar, India, adjacent to the existing petrochemical complex. The facility comprises two PP lines each with a capacity of 450,000tpa. The value of the contract was not disclosed.

Main contacts for petrochemical complex

Aker Kvaerner's AK Process business provided the basic engineering and project management on the PP facility.

Aker Kvaerner Powergas, based in Mumbai, India provided the detailed design and engineering services.

Petron Engineering announced, in April 2007, that it had been awarded a contract to supply mechanical work for PP plant, line-1.

PP process technology

Dow Global Technologies, a subsidiary of Dow Chemicals, was selected to provide its Unipol process technology for the PP facility.

The PP process all gas-phase technology is based on a fluidised bed reactor system. The stable and predictable system is designed to have less movable equipment. The process includes purification, reaction, purging, vent recovery, additives and pelleting.

The mechanical operations of the technology are simple and require less major equipment. The reactors are used to produce homopolymers and other copolymers. The process uses the same gas phase fluidised bed in the copolymer reaction state.

Supply of compression and valve technology

During the second half of 2007, the oil and gas business of GE announced that is had been given a contract to supply compression technology for the refinery and PP plant at Jamnagar. GE supplied three reciprocating compressors, which were manufactured by GE's oil and gas facilities in Florence, Italy, along with two screw compressors.

Metso Automation, a global engineering and technology company, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, was awarded the contract to supply valves and actuators for RPL's PP plant.

Reliance Petroleum and plant background

The new refinery complex is being built adjacent to Reliance Industries Limited's (RIL) existing refinery and petrochemical complex. RIL already has PP capacity at the Jamnagar site, along with capacity at another site in Hazira, India.

RPL, the RIL subsidiary that built the complex, was set up to harness value in the global refining sector. The Jamnagar petrochemical complex saw major capacity expansions in polypropylene and paraxylene by 2008.

The refining plant alone has a capacity of 27 million tpa, which has increased to 108% of the operating rates since April 2000. The entire complex is spread over 31km².

Material from the new refinery and the PP plant is exported to 30 countries, including in Europe and the US, Japan, China, the Middle East and other Southeast Asian markets.

It is said that the Jamnagar complex is the largest grass roots refinery and petrochemical complex in the world.