Reliance Industries Ltd will invest Rs 1.5-lakh crore across its core business verticals over the next three years.
Addressing the company’s 39th Annual General Meeting here on Thursday, Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said Reliance has embarked on the biggest investment programme in its history. Investments would be made in exploration and production of oil and gas, petroleum refining and marketing, petrochemicals, retail and 4G broadband networks, he said.
Manufacturing sites
“We are also investing in scale in all our major manufacturing sites at the same time. Since all of the investments in our core energy and materials businesses are in brownfield sites, these will be among the most competitive projects being executed anywhere in the world,” Ambani said.
On the company’s plans for the oil and gas exploration business, which has been facing pressure due to non-availability of gas from KG-D6 block on the eastern coast, Ambani said that recently some success had been achieved in the MJ1 well in KG-D6 block and this has the potential to significantly add to the company’s resource base.
Efforts are being made to expedite the appraisal and development of the hydrocarbon discovery. Various production augmentation efforts are underway, including maximising recovery from existing fields in the block, he said.
He pointed out that at last year’s AGM, he had mentioned that the company’s petrochemical capacity would increase from 15 million tonnes a year to 25 million tonnes a year on the back of the growing demand. Capacity ramp-up is underway and, as a result, its polyester business will see an expansion in capacity from 1.4 million tonnes to 4 million tonnes a year.
The polyester filament yarn plant at Silvassa will be commissioned in the first half of the current financial year. This will be followed by the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) resin plant in the second half of the year at Dahej, making the company the seventh largest producer of PET in the world, he said.
RIL will also commission a purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant in the first half of next year, followed by another plant of the same capacity within the next six months, taking the total PTA capacity to 4.3 million tonnes a year.
Capacity addition
The company will also double its paraxylene capacity at Jamnagar over the next 30 months to become the second largest producer in the world, Ambani added.
PET, PTA and paraxylene are major chemicals used in the polyester and plastics industry.