Malaysia’s national oil company Petronas has set its sight on India’s growing LNG, petrochemicals and lubricants market as it plans to further expand its presence in the country, a senior company official said on Wednesday. Petronas president and CEO Datuk Wan Zulkiflee said, “We are interested in setting up LNG infrastructure in India including floating terminals to leverage our 30 million tonne per annum supply capacity. We also plan to supply petrochemical products from our upcoming $27-billion refinery-cum-petrochemical plant at Johor in South Malaysia.”
The company has delivered 15 LNG cargoes to India in the last couple of years from its own set-up, the president and CEO said. He said a team of eight people from Petronas undertook a six-day tour of the country and visited non-oil companies to get a feel of the economy and growth in the country. He said with India’s GDP growing at over 7% and energy demand even more than that, they are confident there is lot of scope in the country in terms of opportunities in the oil and gas sector.
“We are aware of the refinery and petchem capacities being set up in India by the public sector and private companies, hence we plan to focus on such products that will act as a feed stock for development of further downstream products,” he said. The company is also investing around $150 million on lubricants business in India at a total investment of $150 million over the next five years. The company is setting up a 110 million litre per annum capacity lubricants plant at Patalganga in Maharashtra. “We plan to commission the plan by January-March of 2018 and plan to triple our market share by 2022,” he said. India is also the biggest importer of Malaysian crude for Petronas. Among the premium Malaysian crude that India imports are Labuan, Miri, Tapis, Kikeh and Cendor.
