Indian Oil Corporation’s 15-million-tonne Paradip refinery project on the Bay of Bengal coast now has the distinction of possessing the world’s largest coke drum.
The coking unit will produce raw petroleum coke, which is termed as ‘bottom of the barrel’ product of any refinery. This is a solid product. There are two distinctive grades of this product — calcination or green raw petroleum coke and fuel grade or petcoke.
Calcination grade is used for producing anodes for the aluminium industry and fuel grade petcoke is used primarily by cement plants.
IndianOil produces calcination grade raw petroleum coke at its Barauni, BRPL, Digboi and Guwahati refineries. Fuel grade petcoke is produced at Panipat refinery.
In a statement, IndianOil said the coke drum was installed on November 15 at the Paradip refinery site. The drum weighs 630 MT and is 45.52 metre in height and 10.67 meter diameter.
The company is looking at second half of 2013 for the refinery to get running. Once commissioned, the Paradip refinery will take IndianOil’s refining capacity to over 80 million tonnes annually.
Manufactured by Larsen & Toubro, Hazira, this coke drum along with saddles was loaded on SPMT (Self Propelled Modular Transporter) and was transported by J M Baxi from the lay down area to the site, IndianOil said.
IndianOil Director (Refineries), RajKumar Ghosh, said the Rs 30,000-crore project is one of the largest projects undertaken in India in terms of investment as well as scale of construction involving a large number of equipment, piping, huge quantity of steel, cement, electrical and electronic machinery and other construction material.
The construction will use up over 10,00,600 cubic meters of concrete. The structural steel used will be over 2.9 lakh MT in weight. Over 2,200 km of pipes will be used in this project and electrical and instrumentation cables will run into over 20,000 km.
Four coke drums will be erected on a 35 metre high concrete foundation, he said.