India Inc is going all out to lend a helping hand in easing the shortage in oxygen supply and easing transportation of the life-saving gas.
JSW Steel is gearing up to ramp up its liquid medical oxygen (LMO) supply to over 900 tonnes a day by month-end while working towards increasing it further. The company said that it is targeting to supply around 20,000 tonnes of liquid oxygen in April from its three plants in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
JSW group chairman and managing director, Sajjan Jindal, was present during the high-level meeting with Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, on Friday. Jindal told Business Standard after the meeting that JSW would supply to its maximum capacity.
Heads of most of the major steel companies were present during the meeting as they were supplying LMO to meet the high demand.
Between April 21 to April 23, JSW Steel had supplied 898 tonnes average daily oxygen from its plant premises, the company said on Sunday.
It had been supplying 600 tonnes daily LMO from JSW's plants complex in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Marathwada region.
Another 250 tonnes of oxygen daily was being supplied from its Dolvi Raigad Maharashtra plant to Mumbai Metropolitan Region, North Maharashtra, Nagpur, Pune, Kolhapur, Nanded, Sangli, Thane, Vasai Virar, and Panvel Raigad.
The company said that it was supplying oxygen for medical purposes as priority in response to the current crises and added that it would not impact production.
Over the weekend, many firms stepped in to ease bottlenecks in supply and transportation of oxygen, as demand ran high with the surge in Covid-19 cases.
Gautam Adani, chairman Adani group tweeted that the company was on an urgent mission to secure oxygen supplies from across the world.
The first shipment of 4 ISO cryogenic tanks with 80 tonnes of liquid oxygen was on its way from Dammam to Mundra, his tweet on Saturday mentioned.
“In addition to ISO cryogenic tanks, we are also securing from Linde Saudi Arabia another 5,000 medical-grade oxygen cylinders. These too will be quickly sent to India. I am thankful to our Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Dr Ausaf Sayeed for assisting us in this regard,” Adani’s tweet read.
The shortage of cryogenic containers was a bottleneck in transporting liquid oxygen and companies were looking to ease it.
ITC said that it had tied up with Linde India to airfreight 24 cryogenic ISO containers of 20 tonnes each from Asian countries for use by them to transport medical oxygen across the country.
In addition, ITC was airlifting a large number of oxygen concentrators for distribution and was also in talks with distributors for oxygen generators for hospitals.
The Tata group’s first set of four cryogenic containers arrived on Saturday. The group is importing 24 cryogenic containers to transport liquid oxygen to help ease the shortage.
Tata Steel is anyway supplying some 300 tonnes of liquid medical oxygen daily to various state governments and hospitals.
On Friday, Union steel minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, tweeted that steel plants from across the country were supplying medical oxygen. More than 143,000 MT LMO had been supplied by steel plants till now with steel CPSEs pitching in with over 39,000 tonnes. On April 23, SAIL tweeted that it had pitched in with metric tonnes of LMO.
Among the private sector steel companies, AM/NS India was supplying 210 tonnes daily; Naveen Jindal chairman, Jindal Steel & Power, tweeted about tankers refilled with LMO being dispatched from its oxygen plant. The company is supplying 100 tonnes daily and may increase to 150 tonnes based on requirement.
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