HPCL to set up LPG bottling plant in Odisha

The Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) is setting up an LPG bottling plant with a capacity of filling 42 lakh cylinders per year at Rayagada in Odisha to meet the growing demand, a top officials of the company said Friday.

Announcing this at a press meet here, Dharmendra Behura, HPCL Deputy General Manager, LPG Region, Bhubaneswar, said Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan is scheduled to lay the foundation stone for the plant on February 19.

The new plant will be the second LPG bottling plant of HPCL in Odisha as it already has one at Jatni.

State owned Oil marketing companies now have LPG bottling plants at Balasore, Jharsuguda, Khurda and Jatni in the state.

The current bottling capacity of the four plants is 2.80 crore cylinders per annum.

In addition to the proposed plant at Rayagada, oil marketing companies have plans to set up new plants at Bhubaneswar and Balangir, Behura said.

Odisha will then have a total of seven LPG bottling plants and their total capacity will be about 4.06 crore cylinders per annum, he said.

There has been a significant growth of LPG in Odisha where the LPG consumer base of 20.22 lakh as in 2014 has grown up to 76.65 lakh now, an increase 279.1 per cent, he said.

The demand for packed LPG in Odisha was 3.2 crore cylinder last year which is expected to be 4.3 crores cylinder by 2020.

The HPCL has 26.64 lakhs customers at present and they consume about 1.3 crore cylinders in a year and it is expected to increase to 1.6 crore cylinders by 2020.

With the LPG demand growing particularly in Western and south-western Odisha, need for putting up a new bottling plant was felt and the historical town of Rayagada was chosen for locating it considering its logistics advantage, Behura said.

The Rayagada plant, once commissioned, shall be supplying cylinders to the consumers in 11 districts.