IOC146;s refinery shutdown spills over three months

The refinery is not expected to be back in full swing until October 15, say sources, but IOC officials claim it would be up and running by Monday bypassing the problem area. 8216;8216;It8217;s not due to negligence. Equipment can malfunction,8217;8217; said IOC chairman M.S. Ramachandran. 8216;8216;We have attended to the faults and the refinery would be on stream from October 3-4.8217;8217;

Though the outage did not affect supplies to consumers, sources say the 40-day delay has led to a net refining margin loss of Rs 88 crore. That is because the 1,60,000-barrels per day Mathura refinery yields the highest net refining margin of 3 per barrel.

In addition, IOC would have to pay Rs 69 crore as demurrages for the VLCC very large crude carriers that had to wait beyond the mandatory 36 hours to discharge Nigerian crude for Mathura.

IOC officials said that collectively the waiting period was about 50 days with an average daily demurrage of 30,000. The shutdown forced IOC to postpone the receipt of crude oil from Iraq.