KOCHI ; Gail (India) Limited awarded the contract for laying 105-km pipeline in the Perole-Kodalamuguru- Mangaluru section to Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services on Tuesday. With this, the project will progress simultaneously from both ends –Kochi and Mangaluru – and the completion of the project will be much faster.
The Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board had on December 2016 given GAIL time till February 2019 to complete the 1,104-km Kochi-Koottanad-Bengaluru-Mangaluru section. The `4,493 crore project was originally scheduled to be completed in March 2013.
“GAIL is targeting to complete the 440-km Kochi–Koottanad—Mangaluru Pipeline by December 2018. The work on the 91-km Kochi–Koottanad section, which was awarded in September 2016, has been received positively by all stakeholders. The pipeline would serve as a ‘green energy corridor’ and enable city gas distribution companies and gas-based industries to come up in the state.
As a result, environment-friendly piped natural gas and compressed natural gas (CNG) would be supplied to households and vehicles,” said B C Tripathi, chairman and managing director of GAIL, who met Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Tuesday to apprise him about the progress of the work on the pipeline project.
The primary objective of the project is to supply LNG from Petronet LNG’s plant at Puthuvype near Kochi to industries in south India.
GAIL is to lay the pipeline in two phases – a 44-km Phase-1 connecting Cochin port to FACT plant in the city and a 1,060-km Phase-II taking the line from there to Thrissur-Koottanand and Palakkad in Kerala and onward to Coimbatore and Salem in Tamil Nadu before reaching Bengaluru.