By Our Correspondent
BALANGIR/BHUBANESWAR: Bad weather on Friday prevented the visit of Vice-President M M Venkaiah Naidu to Odisha to inaugurate the BPCL’s LPG Bottling Plant in State’s western districts of Balangir.
With Vice-President’s visit got cancelled, Odisha Governor Prof Ganeshi Lal flanked by Union PNG-Steel Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Balangir BJP MP Sangeeta Singh Deo, Odisha Higher Education Minister Arun Sahoo and Balangir Congress MLA Narasingha Mishra dedicated the plant.
The foundation stone of Balangir LPG Bottling Plant was laid on 21May 2018 by Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister for Petroleum & Natural Gas & Steel. This plant has been completed in a record 19 months.
Earlier, Naidu, who was currently at Raipur in Chhattisgarh, waited for two hours at the airport to board the special chopper to Balangir. He later returned to Raj Bhawan as bad weather continued to hit flight services.
The state of the art LPG Plant at Balangir in the village Barkani is around 12 kms from Balangir Railway station. The plant is spread over 23 acres and have the capacity to produce 42 lakh cylinders per year.
This plant will house facilities like 24 station Electronic Carousel, Fire water 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.,
Balangir Plant after commissioned shall supply LPG cylinders to the consumers in 14 districts of Odisha namely: Balangir, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Bargarh, Kalahandi, Sonepur Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, 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.
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 end of 2020.
With the LPG demand growing in the State particularly in the Western and South-western Odisha, 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.
