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India is exploring the idea of developing salt caverns in Rajasthan as strategic petroleum reserves and public sector consultancy company Engineers India Ltd (EIL) has been tasked with studying its prospects and feasibility.
According to EIL’s Chairman and Managing Director Vartika Shukla, the company’s recent partnership with Germany’s DEEP.KBB GmbH is in line with the objective as neither EIL nor any other Indian company has the requisite technical knowhow, which the German company has.
The country has three strategic petroleum reserves at Mangaluru, Padur, and Visakhapatnam, but all of these are made up of excavated rock caverns. Over the past decade, while there were plans to build a strategic oil reserve in Rajasthan’s Bikaner, the project never really took off. Shukla said that examining the possibility of salt cavern-based strategic storage in Rajasthan can be seen as a renewal of that proposal.
“There are formations in geology which have salt inside. The salt has to be taken out and then the caverns have to be prepared for storage of crude. Majority of the caverns in the south in America, in the Houston area, are all salt caverns. EIL and Indian companies do not have the technology for preparing salt formations underground for cavern storage of crude. We have done this alliance to get this technology into the country,” Shukla said.
Unlike rock caverns, which are developed through excavation, salt caverns are developed by pumping water into geological formations with large salt deposits to dissolve the salt. Then the salt cavern is created by draining out the salt dissolved in water. Developing salt caverns is said to be easier, faster, less labour-intensive, and cheaper than building a rock cavern.
On being asked about the likely project cost and whether any specific site is being considered, Shukla said that it is too early to draw up a cost estimate or zero in on a specific site. But she added that the idea is that it would be somewhere in Rajasthan, as it is the state in India that has salt caverns.
Rajasthan has a forthcoming refinery in Barmer and has crude pipelines as well, and such infrastructure is conducive for building strategic oil reserves.
“Once the technology or knowledge is there, only then we can have estimates as to what kind of costs will be involved, and there are so many other factors as well. There will be many steps to project approval and they will be taken step by step. But it is important that India gets that technology, EIL gets that technology to… get an estimate and see how feasible it is,” she said.
India’s strategic petroleum reserves have a cumulative capacity of 5.33 million tonnes of crude, and can meet around 9.5 days of the country’s oil demand. The strategic oil reserves come under the petroleum ministry SPV Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
