Vice President Venkaiah Naidu will inagurate BPCL bottling plant in Balangir
Vice President Venkaiah Naidu will inagurate BPCL bottling plant in Balangir. It is dedicated to the nation on December 27th 2019. It will be the second bottling plant of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL), a public sector undertaking under the Union ministry of petroleum and natural gas, after Khurda.
The plant, spread over 23 acres at Barkani, 12km from Balangir railway station, has the capacity to produce 42 lakh cylinders per year. It will supply LPG cylinders to the consumers in 14 districts of western and south-western part of the state. These are Balangir, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Bargarh, Kalahandi, Sonepur, Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, Boudh, Kandhamal, Rayagada and Nuapada.
Petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan had laid foundation stone of the LPG bottling plant on May 21 last year. This plant has been completed in a record 19 months. We had fixed a deadline of March 2020. The plant has been set up with an estimated cost of Rs 103 crore, said Sanjay Sharma, state head, LPG – Odisha and Jharkhand – BPCL, here on Sunday.
The oil company has been supplying gas since 1988 from its LPG bottling plant at Khurda. The company has 21.59 lakh customers in the state and they consume 78 lakh cylinders per year. The consumption may go up to 105 lakh cylinders by end of 2020, said a BPCL official.
Oil marketing companies, including BPCL, have LPG bottling plants at Balasore, Jharsuguda, Khurda and Jatni. Besides Balangir plant, two more bottling units are coming up at Khurda and Rayagada. Odisha will have a total of seven LPG bottling plants after commissioning of the new plants. Capacity of these seven plants will be 4.06 crore cylinders per annum, said an official source.
There were 20.22 lakh LPG consumers in the state on June 1, 2014, said an official source. But the number has increased to 88.10 lakh in 2019. Demand for packed LPG in the state was 454.3 thousand metric tonne (TMT) last year. It is expected to touch 610 TMT by end of 2020. Number of LPG distributors in the state has increased from 367 in 2014 to 932 this year.
IIM Sambalpur
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