No supply crunch

New Delhi, Oct. 26: Petroleum minister Murli Deora today said any fears over shortage of cooking gas in the country were “unwarranted as the public sector oil companies had 15-day stocks with them and had also floated tenders for importing additional supplies if the need arose”.

The minister said Reliance Industries had a 12-day stock of LPG in its storage tanks and the refinery at Jamnagar was functioning close to normal capacity as the fire had affected only one downstream unit.

Senior officials said tenders had been floated to import an additional 65,000 tonnes of cooking gas as a safety precaution. The oil companies had the option of cancelling the tenders if more LPG was not required.

Deora, who took stock of the situation at a meeting of chief executives of oil companies here today said the country had enough stocks to meet LPG requirement for more than two weeks.

Meanwhile, the death toll in the Reliance refinery has gone up to two following the discovery of the dead body of a worker reported missing yesterday. Another company employee, who suffered more than 60 per cent burn injuries, has been moved to Mumbai for treatment.

A Reliance official said there would be no shortage of any petroleum products because of the fire. The fire had affected only a small section of the refinery.

He said such fears were unfounded as the fluid catalytic cracker unit that gets its feedstock from the vacuum gas oil hydrotreater was operating normally. The refinery had also boosted output at the other vacuum gasoil hydrotreater to make up for the shortfall. The Jamnagar refinery supplies one-fifth of the 12-million-tonne LPG demand of the country. The Jamnagar refinery produces 7,500 tonnes of LPG per day.

Earlier, an unscheduled maintenance shutdown of the refinery had caught the public sector oil companies by surprise and they had to resort to heavy imports to fill the gap.