Reliance Industries (RIL) is in the process of making its mega Jamnagar refinery complex future-ready with a strategic transformation to an optimal oil-to-chemicals strategy that would eliminate most fuels it produces in favour of high-value products. It plans to produce only jet fuel and petrochemicals.
“The company has developed a future-ready oil-to-chemical strategic vision to progressively transform the Jamnagar refinery from a leading producer of fuels to chemicals,” RIL said in its latest annual report outlining its vision. Its refineries currently convert crude oil sourced from around the globe into petrol, diesel, LPG, aviation turbine fuel (ATF), LPG, naphtha and other value-added fuels. Some of these products are used to produce petrochemicals used for making plastics and other products. Now, it is implementing a strategy that will convert the crude oil into petrochemicals and ATF used in aeroplanes only.
The fundamentals of the Jamnagar oil-to-chemical strategy are to employ advanced molecule management to upgrade the refinery intermediate streams by value. “The oil-to-chemical programme is a roadmap implemented over a long time horizon, based on market outlook and price triggers for refinery fuel products. The ultimate goal is to achieve greater than 70 per cent conversion of crude refined in Jamnagar to competitive chemical building blocks of olefins and aromatics,” it said.
Meanwhile, RIL’s burgeoning debt is an overhang. Last fiscal, its finance cost more than doubled to Rs 16,495 crore from Rs 8,052 crore a year ago.