This portion was originally earmarked for a financial institution but the revised thinking in the ministry is that BPCL would be a better choice as it would need access to the pipeline to evacuate products from its Bina refinery in Madhya Pradesh. The Rs 8,000 crore project with a capacity of six million tonnes is scheduled to be commissioned four years from now around the same time as CIPL.

There is no room for Hindustan Petroleum Corporation in the plan where the other stakeholders are Essar Oil with 11 per cent and Indian Oil Corporation, Reliance Petroleum (RPL) and Petronet India with 26 per cent each. HPCL, it may be recalled, had stated that it would like to step out of the project though reports doing the rounds in New Delhi indicate that the oil PSU may stake a claim given the enormous network of the pipeline.

The petroleum ministry had earlier mooted a proposal for the equity pattern where Petronet would hold 51 per cent with the balance taken up by other oil companies based on their refining capacities. This would ensure that the national oil companies and their private counterparts would get a stake in the pipeline.

Based on a total refining capacity of 77 million tonnes, the individual equity structure would have translated into IOC holding roughly 22 per cent, RPL 20 per cent, Essar Oil four per cent and BPCL three per cent.

The CIPL network will begin from Jamnagar and reach Koyali where a new product storage terminal of IOC's Gujarat refinery is being planned. Rajkot is proposed to be an intermediate delivery point en route.

The products of the Gujarat refinery will be injected into the system at Koyali. The provision of connecting CIPL with IOC's Koyali-Ahmedabad and Koyali-Navagam pipelines at Koyali has also been made for flexibility in the supply source.

From Koyali, the pipeline will extend to Ratlam where it will be bifurcated into two networks. The northern trunk pipeline will go to Kota and terminate at Gwalior while a 180 kilometre branch pipeline is planned from the Ratlam-Kota section.

The other network, the southern trunk pipeline, will pass through Itarsi and thereon to Nagpur. It shall either be terminated here or be extended up to Hyderabad depending upon the viability of the Nagpur-Hyderabad section. Branch pipelines are planned for Indore and Bhopal from the Ratlam-Itarsi section.

It was in October last year that RPL submitted its pipeline plan which involved constructing a 550 km network from Jamnagar to Indore via Ahmedabad. In the second phase, the company planned to extend this from Indore to Hyderabad via Bhopal and Nagpur. Two branch pipelines were also part of the proposal -- one from Ahmedabad to Patna via Udaipur, Kota, Gwalior, Kanpur and Allahabad and the other from Ahmedabad to Hazira.