NEW DELHI: India’s biggest refiner Indian Oil Corp will continue to import gasoline until at least December due to a heavy maintenance line-up and the slow start-up of a key unit at a new refinery, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. Asia-based traders of the fuel said they had expected IOC to stop importing gasoline and halt naphtha exports once a unit involved in the production of the motor fuel started up at the 300,000 barrel-per-day refinery in Paradip on India’s northeast coast.
IOC started up the Paradip plant last year and is still commissioning some units. In March it commissioned Paradip’s continuous catalytic reformer (CCR), which uses naphtha as a feedstock to produce reformate, a product used to make gasoline. “The CCR was functional for a week (and) after that there was a problem with the compressor,” said one of the sources. It is not clear when the CCR will start back up, and IOC did not respond to a request for comment.
The refiner – which has handled most of India’s gasoline imports in the surge of shipments that started in April of last year – has kept taking gasoline to fill the domestic supply gap, putting out a recent tender seeking up to 30,000 tonnes (255,000 barrels) of the fuel for an Aug. 5-7 delivery. India’s overall gasoline imports hit a peak in May at 160,000 tonnes, highest since June 2015, before falling to 40,000 tonnes in June of this year, according to official data.
