India's planned west coast LNG plant attracts 4 initial bids

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India Gas Solutions, a joint venture of Reliance Industries Ltd and BP, U.S.-based Excelerate Energy and Japan's Mitsui and Co Ltd have bid to build a gas import facility on India's west coast, a company official said.

A consortium of Norway's Hoegh LNG and IMC infrastructure has also participated in the initial tender, said R. M. Parmar, chairman of Mumbai Port Trust.

Energy-hungry India is building liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals at various locations to boost the use of the fuel to cut carbon emissions and improve air quality.

Nearly a quarter of a century after India's economic liberalisation, many businesses still rely on costly backup generators for round-the-clock power and one third of its 1.2 billion people are still not connected to the grid.

Currently, India has four LNG terminals with combined annual capacity of 20 million tonnes on the country's west coast.

A 5 million tonne-a-year floating storage and re-gasification unit (FSRU) at the Mumbai port along with other infrastructure such as pipelines would coast about 30 billion rupees, Parmar told Reuters.

He said the Mumbai Port Trust, which is the facilitator for the project and will charge a fee from the company building and operating the FSRU, plans to award the contract for construction of the terminal by the end of this year.

The Mumbai port LNG project is expected to be completed by early 2018, he said.

Reliance and BP in 2011 established India Gas Solutions through an equal partnership to source, market and transport natural gas in Asia's third-largest economy.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma, editing by David Evans)