Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd. (MRPL) plans to buy about 40,000 barrels a day of Iran’s heaviest crudes as it starts a new unit that will help process lower-quality grades at its facility in western India.
We will continue to buy about 80,000 barrels per day from Iran in the next fiscal year if the US sanctions remain,” Vijay Joshi, refinery director, said in a telephone interview. “But we plan to replace about half of this with heavier grades Norooz and Soroosh.
“It will begin taking the heavier grades after 1 April,” Joshi said. The company, known as MRPL, has a crude-purchase contract with Iran that runs for 12 months.
Mangalore Refinery, owned by India’s biggest state-run explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd. (ONGC), will start a new delayed coking unit at its 300,000 barrels-a-day refinery within a week. It will allow the company to process cheaper, heavier crudes when it reaches full commercial production in March.
The new 60,000 barrel-a-day unit will increase the company’s margins as the refiner seeks to revive earnings. It reported losses in three of the past four quarters as the rupee’s plunge to a record drove up import costs. Iran is selling the Norooz and Soroosh grades to Asian refiners in December at $6.80 a barrel below the price of its Iranian heavy crude, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
We have processed 37 varieties of crude in our refinery and the coker will give a lot of flexibility on our choice of crude,” Joshi said. “We will look more aggressively for buying Latin American crude grades, which we have not processed.Mangalore Refinery bought 1 million barrels of Argentina’s Escalante crude earlier in the week,” Joshi said, adding the parcel will be delivered in March.
India plans to buy 11 million metric tonnes of Iranian crude this financial year after the European Union (EU) eased its sanctions on insuring cargoes following a six-month accord in November between the Persian Gulf state, the US and five other nations. The parties will implement the agreement on 20 January.
The South Asian country’s imports could fall 14% to 9.5 million tonnes in the year ending March 2015 if the US and EU sanctions remain in place., R.K. Singh, joint secretary for refineries at the oil ministry, said on 14 January in New Delhi
Source:- livemint.com
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