Bhubaneswar: The Petroleum, Chemicals and Petrochemicals Investment Region (PCPIR) set up at Paradip has attracted investments worth Rs 73,518 crore resulting in employment of about 40,000 people.
This was informed by Union Minister of State Petroleum & Natural Gas, Rameswar Teli in Rajya Sabha today.
In a written reply to a question of BJD MP Sasmit Patra, the Union Minister said the Government has notified the PCPIR Policy, 2007 to attract investment in Petroleum, Chemicals & Petrochemicals and for generation of employment in specifically delineated investment regions for this purpose.
A PCPIR is a combination of production units, public utilities, logistics, environmental protection mechanisms, residential areas and administrative services. Each PCPIR would have a refinery/ petrochemical feedstock company as an anchor tenant, he said.
The anchor tenant for the development of PCPIR in Kendrapara and Jagatsinghpur districts of Odisha is Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) which owns and operates Paradip refinery of 15 Million Metric Tonnes Per Annum (MMTPA) capacity.
In order to promote plastic based industries, IOCL has partnered with Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO) as supporting equity partner in “Paradeep Plastic Park Limited” wherein one 680 Kiloton per Annum (KTA) Polypropylene (PP) plant and one 357 KTA Mono Ethylene Glycol (MEG) plant have already been commissioned, Shri Teli said.
As per information compiled by the Department of Chemicals & Petrochemicals, so far Investments worth Rs. 73,518 crore have been made in Odisha PCPIR resulting in employment of about 40,000 people, he added.
The planned Paradip petrochemical complex would be one of India’s four proposed PCPIRs.
Spread over 284 sq km of land spread over Jagatsinghpur and Kendrapara districts, the Paradip PCPIR will be anchored by IOC’s Paradip refinery and petrochemical units that, together, would supply the chemical complex all necessary feedstock, including monoethylene glycol, petcoke-based synthetic ethanol, and paraxylene-purified terephthalic acid (PX-PTA), according to reports.
In its latest 2021-22 annual report to investors, IOC said it expects to commission the PX-PTA plant at Paradip by January 2024. Once completed, the new PX-PTA plant will have a PX production capacity of 800,000 tpy, which will be used as feedstock for an adjacent 1.2-million tpy PTA plant to be built as part of the project (OGJ Online, Sept. 18, 2020).