Rupali Mukherjee & Rajeev Jayaswal

New Delhi, June 14: The Union government has cleared the proposal of oil major Bharat Shell seeking an extension in the technical collaboration agreement with the UK-based Shell International Petroleum Company. Bharat Shell is a joint venture between Shell Overseas Investments BV, UK and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL), in which Shell Overseas Investments holds a majority equity stake of 51 per cent.

The over $13 billion Shell group is one of the top three oil companies in the world which operates in more than 135 countries and is engaged in the oil, gas, chemicals and other businesses.

Bharat Shell started marketing and then manufacturing lubricants and later diversified into LPG. In lubricants, the company sells about 45,000 Kl per annum in industrial and automotive sector and is the market leader in the industrial sector. It has also set up its own blending plant at Taloja in Maharashtra, which is operating from 1996. It has a 1 lakh tpy LPG terminal at Pipavav and a 1 lakh tpy bottling plant at Gujarat.

The government has already approved payment of royalty at the rate of 3 per cent under the technical collaboration agreement to Shell International. The group has provided state-of-the-art lubricating oil blending technology support which has enabled Bharat Shell to construct, commission and successfully run a lubricating oil blending plant (LOBP) at Taloja.

Shell has supported BSL in choosing and purchasing the right technology which consists of automated batch blending (ABB) and simultaneous metered blending (SMB) connected to a central computer.