The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Manali refinery to set up desalination plant

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 20, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Manali refinery to set up desalination plant

By Our Staff Reporter

CHENNAI, MAY 19. Households are not the only ones incurring more expenditure on water, as industrial establishments in and around the city are drawing-up multi-crore plans to tide over the crisis, especially to establish desalination plants.

The latest to join the list of such public enterprises is Manali refinery of Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited. According to the company's managing director, S.V. Narasimhan, his organisation has decided to set up a seawater desalination plant at a cost of Rs. 193.31 crores.

The plant, with a capacity to supply 5.8 million gallons daily, is expected to provide succour to the water-intensive unit, whose production had to be curtailed a few years ago for shortfall in the supply by Metrowater. Apart from meeting the requirement to cool the refined products, the plant would help meet the water demand of the workforce in the refinery.

The refinery's water needs are expected to increase once all components of its three million-tonne capacity expansion go on stream. The total water requirement of CPCL is estimated at seven million gallons daily. The desalination plant will be implemented in 30 months. CPCL is awaiting final approval from the IOC board for proceeding with the project. It has initiated necessary steps for obtaining all statutory and environmental clearances.

At present, the CPCL refinery gets its water from Metrowater and by recycling sewage and effluents — it purchases 25 lakh gallons of sewage, removes biological and chemical impurities through a series of filters and uses it. The refinery has also decided to set up another sewage treatment plant - with a capacity of 2.5 million gallons daily. The cost of the project is Rs.38 crores and it is expected to be completed by September 2005. Today's announcement of CPCL comes close on the heels of the decision of Chennai Port Trust to set up a desalination plant to meet the water requirement inside the harbour and those of the 1,000 families at its residential complex at Tondiarpet.

Initially, the plant at the port will have a capacity to supply one million litres of treated water. Later, it will be scaled to two million litres. According to the port estimates, a plant to supply 0.5 million litres of water daily will cost around Rs.1.5 crores.

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