MOSCOW (MRC) -- India's Reliance Industries, owner of the world's biggest refining complex, is preparing to lift oil from Iran next month after a gap of about five years, said Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to an industry source with knowledge of talks between the two.
The Indian conglomerate, controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, stopped Iranian oil imports in 2010 because it was worried that the threat of US sanctions on companies doing business with the Islamic republic would complicate its efforts to boost market share for its fuels in the US.
Now with an end this year to the Western sanctions that had halved Iran's oil exports to about 1 MMbpd, Tehran is trying to recoup lost market share and Reliance is keen to get Iranian barrels back into its crude diet.
Officials from India's biggest private refiner recently visited Iran to chalk out the details for resumption of trade ties with Tehran, the source said, and to begin with, National Iranian Oil Co. (NIOC) will be supplying a million spot barrels each of condensate and crude oil to Reliance in a single cargo.
The shipment will make Reliance Iran's first new Indian oil customer since the lifting of the sanctions.
Reliance is also talking to NIOC for a term deal to buy 100,000 to 120,000 bpd of oil, the same level it used to buy before sanctions hit its imports.
Reliance's sophisticated complex at Jamnagar in western Gujarat state can refine 1.24 million bpd of crude as varied as light West African to heavy sour Middle East and Latin American grades, allowing it to switch to whatever crude is cheapest.
We remind that, as MRC informed previously, in April 2015, Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) successfully put into operation two plants in Dahej, Gujarat, India. The first is a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) resin plant, which consists of two lines with a combined manufacturing capacity of 650 KTA. This is one of the largest bottle-grade PET resin capacity at a single location globally, and consolidates Reliance’s position as a leading PET resin producer with a global capacity of 1.15 MMTPA. The second facility is a new purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant that provides a capacity of 1,150 KTA. With the commissioning of this plant, also built with Invista technology, Reliance’s total PTA capacity will increase to 3.2 MMTPA, and its global capacity share will rise to 4%.
Reliance Industries is one of the world's largest producers of polymers. The company's polymer production in 2010-11 (polypropylene, polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride) made 4,094 kilo tonnes.
MRC