Posted on 10/10/2006 9:18:33 PM PDT by thackney
Sitting on the edge of the water in the Gulf of Kutch on India's western shore is one of America's dirty secrets. A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 13 square miles (33sq km) - a third of the area of Manhattan - which will eventually become the world's largest petrochemical refinery.
The products from the Jamnagar complex are for foreign consumption. When complete, the facility will be able to refine 1.24m barrels of crude a day. Two-fifths of this gasoline will be sent 9,000 miles (15,000km) by sea to America.
India's biggest private company, Reliance Industries, with a market capitalisation of $33bn (£17.8bn), runs the plant. Controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, whose father Dhirubhai founded the company, Reliance towers over its industry rivals, contributing 8% of India's exports.
The company's ambitions in Jamnagar have helped India move from being a net importer to an exporter of refined petroleum products. "We want to make a statement that India can be an industrial giant. Jamnagar is a refinery for the world, based out of India," said Hital Meswani, executive director of Reliance Industries. "In the mid-90s when this project was conceived, no one believed it would work. We were told there was too much capacity, returns were not great and every management consultant we hired told us don't bother."
In the dizzy days of the 90s internet boom, distilling crude into diesel, gasoline, home-heating oil and aviation fuel was considered a dinosaur business, with low margins and large outlays. Oil refining was yesterday's business, not tomorrow's.
A hi-tech gamble
But Reliance says it gambled on a "paradigm shift" in the economics of the refinery business. The company, which began as a textile trader but moved into producing polyester, had noticed that India was importing millions of tonnes of...
(Excerpt) Read more at business.guardian.co.uk ...
Somehow this is supposed to be bad I guess?
If we can't build them here, we'll build them there. Shame about all the lost jobs, though.
It's from an Indian newspaper.
Many will think so. I don't understand a big difference between importing foreign oil to be refined and importing foreign oil after it is refined. I think the lack of domestic oil production is a much bigger problem for the US.
Why from India? Is the oil from Central Asia? Otherwise, why not a country closer to the source?
California imports oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Oman. This is one the way.
Maybe they're worried about pollution in India. Can't see why India would object, otherwise.
It's from "The Guardian" - not your most capitalist publication.
Still, the writing is fair, though you can see the "shock value" trying to push its way to the front.
Lost on me. Good for Western India. Probably didn't have the permitting problems/payoffs that Joe Schmoe in the States gets trying to dig a septic drainfield.
A pipeline runs from southwestern Asia (Middle East) through Pakistan to India? Didn't they only agree to that recently? Also, why not through the Gulf. Iran can't complete with the United States' Navy there, and wouldn't a route across the Mediterranean and Atlantic be closer, unless it is for the western United States?
Why would the poster entitle this "America's dirty secret?"
It seems to me more likely that allowing murderous Islamo nut cases to reside in their countries in Europe is more likely a "dirty secret" for Europe than what the poster put up as the title for this article.
Since we have all the wacko's in the EPA and all the various pseudo scientific people in the US who hate the internal combustion engine and want to return us to the horse and buggy days, where should the U.S. build its new refineries? We haven't been allowed to build a new one in the U.S. for 30+ years due to government and weenie interference. Why then should we listen to this pap? Why indeed, Algore?
Not an expert, perhaps one will show up, but I am pretty sure that our lack of refining capacity is worse than US drilling shortages.
At least India is a capitalistic democracy friendly to our interests; not an Islamic theocracy ambivalent/hostile to our interests...
that being said.. we transport oil or gas by ship, why don't we circumvent land based environmental regulations and refine at sea??? crude oil tanker pulls up to refinery ship (or rig)and offloads crude, ship refines it processes it and offloads finished gasoline, diesel etc to fuel tanker as well as waste sludge etc to be disposed of at an appropriate time and place. Would reduce/eliminate a lot of the backlog, esp in places like the LOOP and other such massive offshore oil ports (supertanker comes in, offloads crude in deep water to smaller tankers)
Right! Damn tree huggers!
I think your right - our "secret" is that we aren't entirely beholding to Saudi Arabia.
On the ship-based refineries though there are no doubt size restraints as per the article: "A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 13 square miles ..."
I don't see how. The US uses 18,656,000 BPD of petroleum products a day. (not including natural gas liquids)
We refine 15,220,000 BPD of crude oil every day, or about 82% of our refined products are refined in the US.
But we only produce 5,178,000 BPD of crude oil. We only produce 28% of the oil we consume. We could nearly triple our US domestic oil production before reaching the capacity of our existing refineries.
Taxes and royalties are much higher on crude oil production compared to the refining process. If we added 1 million barrels a day domestic oil production, we would import 1 million barrels a day less oil. If we added 1 million barrels a day domestic refinery production, we would only trade off importing refined products for importing more foreign oil.
Thanks for the info, you are clearly better informed on this subject than I am, but I don't see what our total refining capacity is compared to what part of that capacity we are using.
Why of course it's bad. Do really think that India crawling out of its socialist abyss that's it has barely survived in since independence is a good thing? All good leftists know that it would be much better for India to return to it's "glory" days of near-communism what like Nehru and other leaders inflicted on the country in the past to keep it in grinding poverty and near-starvation. (/sarcasm)
Regards, Ivan
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