IOC studying pipeline route between Chennai-Bangalore

Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) has started examining the best possible route to lay a pipeline between Chennai and Bangalore to transport petroleum products. A company official said a detailed route study would be completed in three months.

The planned pipeline would require an investment of Rs 290 crore and span about 290 kilometres, said the IOC official. Once the detailed route study is completed, it would have to be sent to IOC's board for the next move.

Bangalore is already being served by a pipeline that brings in petroleum products from Mangalore. The pipeline coming from Chennai would be used to evacuate Chennai Petroleum's output for the Bangalore and surrounding markets.

The key benefit from using pipelines to transport petroleum products is that it reduces transport cost to about one-tenth of the amount spent when using road transport.

In mid-August, IOC commissioned a 526 kilometre pipeline from Chennai to Madurai via Trichy. At present, the pipeline moves 220 metric tonne of petroleum products every hour.

An IOC official said that the petroleum products' movement through the pipeline was equivalent to using 15 tank lorries every hour.

The Chennai-Trichy-Madurai pipeline required an investment of Rs 409 crore, and is IOC's first such project in Tamil Nadu. The only other pipeline for petroleum products in Tamil Nadu is the one put up by Petronet that starts from Kochi and ends in Karur.

Some more work on the Chennai-Trichy-Madurai pipeline is to be carried out. At Asanur, about 256 km south west of Chennai, the pipeline is to branch west for a distance of 157 km and end in Sankari.

Work on the branch is under way. Once the entire pipeline is commissioned, it would move 1.8 million metric tonne of petroleum products a year.