The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Visakhapatnam News : LPG cavern creates history

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Friday, Apr 18, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Visakhapatnam

LPG cavern creates history

J. Balaji

For the first time, storage level reaches close to capacity

VISAKHAPATNAM: The Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) cavern near the Dolphin’s Nose hill, the deepest in the world (181 metres below mean sea level), has created history this week by storing as high as 57,277 tonnes of LPG.

This is the first time in any part of India where such a huge storage is maintained at a single point. This is just short of some 2,700 tonnes against its full capacity of 60,000 tonnes.

As the ship from Saudi Arabia – Maharishi Bharadwaj, a very large gas carrier (VLGC) with the capacity of 40,000 tonnes, started unloading the gas into the 60,000 tonnes cavern, the storage figure moved up.

This is despite the HPCL and other agencies continuously retrieving LPG from the cavern for their use. It is to be noted that the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) is moving LPG from here to Hyderabad via Rajahmundry and Vijayawada through an underground pipeline.

Though the ship belonging to Varun Shipping has made four sorties to the Visakhapatnam port bringing LPG since the cavern was commissioned late last year, this is the first time that the LPG level in the caverns has reached very close to its full capacity.

The two caverns are owned and managed by the South Asia LPG Company Private Limited (SALPG), a 50:50 joint venture between the HPCL and Total, an oil major of France.

Safety award

SALPG Chief Executive Officer P. Dwarakanath told The Hindu that the cavern project had won the award for safety from the British Safety Council.

A letter to this effect had been received from the council and the award would be given both to the contractor (L&T, who built the caverns) and their employer (SALPG).

He recalled that a few months ago a similar award was given by the national safety council to the project.

Another uniqueness of this Rs.333-crore project, which has already exceeded the international standards of such LPG storage – BS EN 1918-4, is that this is the first time in the country that the entire fighting system is made fully automatic and the project has such huge storage capacity of water on ground to sustain the emergency operations continuously for six hours, though the world standard is only four hours.

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