National oil marketing company Indian Oil Corporation’s bottling plant in Cherlapally here is geared to cater to growing demand for the new, differentiated LPG cylinders for commercial applications such as XtraTej that IOC had launched recently.
A key asset for Indian Oil in the region supplying liquefied petroleum gas to almost all of Telangana, the plant had already shifted to filling 47.5 kg cylinders only with XtraTej.
“It is [also] going to be 100% very soon for 19 kg cylinders,” Deputy General Manager-Plant Jai Prakash Pandey said, adding the initial customer response to XtraTej has been encouraging. Boosted with additives developed in-house, the new addition to the Indane portfolio offers commercial and industrial users fuel saving on account of higher flame temperature and comes at no additional cost.
Stating that the additive dosing facility, at the plant, is operational and in need for some more fine-tuning, J.V.Krishna, DGM- LPG Operations said “our intention is whatever 19 kg we sell should be positioned as a speciality product.”
Earlier, briefing mediapersons on a visit to the Cherlapally plant, the two IOC officials said it is a fully automated plant and equipped with a carousel that can accommodate 72 cylinders. The facility is a mainstay for IOC in catering to its customer base of 57 lakh in Telangana through 352 distributors. The company commands a market share of 41% in the State.
The carousal is only such for IOC with high speed filling capacity of 4,000 cylinders (14.2 kg) per hour and has three stage filling for better accuracy. Vision readers and integrated weight correction units in the carousel facilitates filling of refill cylinders to the precise weight. The plant can churn out 3,900 LPG cylinders per hour, an IOC release said.
The bottling plant, located on a little over 32 acres, fills around 55,000 LPG cylinders per day, translating into an annual bottling capacity of 1.80 lakh tonnes. The LPG storage capacity is 2,300 tonnes in the form of six above ground bullets, with a combined capacity of 900 tonnes, and one Horton sphere with a capacity of 1,400 tonnes.
Additional tankage
There are plans to establish additional LPG tankage of 2,400 tonnes in mounded storage, something the officials confirmed, but did not want to elaborate as they are at a preliminary stage.
Besides the facility, IOC has another bottling plant in Thimmapur, much of whose requirement of bulk LPG is supplied from Cherlapally, which in turn receives the fuel on a pipeline from Visakhapatnam. The release said the Cherlapally plant supplies LPG cylinders to customers through a network of over 300 Indane LPG distributors across all Telangana, excluding Mahabubnagar, and auto LPG to all the outlets in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
While Mr.Pandey said the plant capacity had increased over the years, Mr.Krishna said 14.2 kg and 5 kg cylinders, 19 kg and 47.5 kg cylinders and 19 kg Nanocut cylinders, for precision cutting industrial application, are filled at the plant.