Estimates indicate a requirement of an additional 40 product pipelines, a significant number considering that barely eight are presently under purview by Petronet India.

By the end of this year, the first of these eight, the Vadinar-Kandla pipeline is expected to be operational. This will be followed by another network from Cochin to Karur and from Mangalore to Bangalore. On the cards are the Chennai-Tiruchi-Madurai, Bina-Jhansi-Kanpur, Bhatinda-Jammu via Jalandhar and Paradeep-Rourkela-Ranchi. This apart, there is the mega Central India Pipeline (CIPL) whose equity structure is presently being reviewed by the ministry of petroleum and natural gas.

The panel has now estimated that more than five times this number would be required for a 15-year span ending 2020 (see table). Logically, these would be executed by Petronet India but it remainsto be seen if the country would actually need all these networks. These have been based assuming a demand of 320 million tonnes of liquid petroleum products by 2020 which, in turn, would require refining capacity of over 330 million tonnes. Creation of this additional supply infrastructure would obviously mean that the produce will have to be evacuated from the refineries and this explains the need for the additional product pipelines. Interestingly, the group has also drawn up five new crude pipelines between 2006 and 2020 and these include Haldia-Barauni and Pipavav-Koyali (expansion), Mundra to Sultanpur via Bina and Vadinar-Bhatinda. The two under planning are those from Mundra to Koyali and Jamnagar to Bina and the investment envisaged for both the product and crude pipelines is Rs 29,000 crore for the period 2006-2020.

The panel justifies the extnesive network in view of the increase in railway transportation cost for POL as well as limitation in the track capacity of the railways. This, in turn,would increase the pipeline transport capacity from the present 15-16 per cent to 50 per cent by reducing the tank wagon movement from 45 per cent to 25-30 per cent. The expert group believes this will have the benefit of reduction in transportaton cost which will ultimately help customers.

The 40 additional pipelines would certainly be required considering the phenomenal refining capacity in 2020. The networks planned for the south (Ennore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Salem) have been based on the demand in these regions which will be met from IOC's refinery in Nagapattinam as also the enhanced capacities of MRPL, CRL and MRL. Likewise, pipelines would be needed for evacuating the produce of the two 15 million tonne facilities being planned in Deogarh and Krishnapatnam. IOC alone will have a refining capacity of close to 140 million tonnes in 2020, nearly 50 per cent of the total envisaged for that year. The role of Petronet in these projects is crucial as it was formed with the objective of providing pipelinetransportation to all oil companies on a common carrier principle.