Vice President to inaugurate Balangir LPG Bottling Plant

Bhubaneswar: Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu is slated to inaugurate an LPG Bottling Plant in Odisha’s Balangir district on December 27.

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) has set up a new state of the art LPG Bottling Plant at Village Barkani in the district.

BPCL is already having an LPG Bottling Plant at Khurda. For BPCL, the new plant that has been constructed at Balangir will be the second in the State of Odisha.

The state of the art LPG Plant at Balangir in the village Barkani is around 12 km from Balangir Railway station. 

The plant is spread over 23 acres and has the capacity to produce 42 lakh cylinders per year.  This plant will house facilities like 24 station Electronic Carousel, Firewater Tanks of 1853KL capacity each, Filling & Filled shed, 8 Bay Tank lorry Decantation gantry and 3 x 300 MT (Metric Tons) Mounded Storage Vessel, etc.

The foundation stone of Balangir LPG Bottling Plant was laid on 21st May 2018 by Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

This plant has been completed in a record 19 months.

The plant will be operational after the inauguration. Balangir Plant once commissioned shall supply LPG cylinders to the consumers in 14 districts of Odisha namely: Balangir, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Bargarh, Kalahandi, Sonepur Koraput, Malkangiri, Nowrangpur, Boudh, Kandhamal, Raygada and Nuapada.

Oil Marketing Companies are having LPG Bottling Plants at Balasore, Jharsuguda, Khurda, and Jatni. The bottling capacity in 2014 was 1.48 crores cylinders while now in 2019 it is 2.96 crores cylinders.

In addition to the proposed LPG Bottling Plant at Balangir, Oil Marketing Companies have plans to set up new plants at Khurda and Rayagada.

Odisha will have a total of 7 LPG Bottling Plants once all the new plants are completed. The bottling capacity of these 7 bottling plants will be 4.06 crores cylinders per annum.

LPG consumers in Odisha state were 20.22 lakhs in 2014 and have grown up to 88.10 lakhs in 2019 which is an increase of customer base by 335.71% during this 5 year period.

The demand for packed LPG in Odisha was 454.3 TMT (Thousand Metric Tons) last year which is expected to be 610 TMT by end of 2020. The LPG Penetration in the State of Odisha was 20 % in 2014 which has increased to 81.3% by 2019 thus an increase of 61.3% in penetration.

The number of distributors in the State of Odisha was 367 in 2014 which has increased to 932 till 2019 thus addition of 565 new distributorships in the last 4 years i.e. Increase of around 154%.

Amongst the Oil Manufacturing Companies, BPCL itself has 21.59 lakhs customers till now who consume approximately 78 lakh cylinders in a year. This consumption is expected to increase from 78 lakh cylinders to 105 lakh cylinders by the end of 2020.

With the LPG demand growing in the State particularly in the Western and South-western Odisha, the need for putting up a new bottling plant was felt and the historical town of Balangir was chosen for locating the plant considering the logistics advantage of the location.