The story so far: On April 25, the Maharashtra government started conducting soil testing at Rajapur tehsil’s Barsu village in the coastal Ratnagiri district to know if the site was suitable for the proposed multi-billion dollar Ratnagiri Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (RRPCL) project which is touted as the world’s largest single location refinery complex. As of April 2022, India’s oil refining capacity stood at 251.2 million metric tonnes per annum, making it the second-largest refiner in Asia and the fourth largest in the world.
What is the Barsu refinery project?
The project, which is expected to have a capacity of 60 million tonnes per annum, is a joint venture between Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Indian Oil Corporation Limited, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited. The project was initially mooted in 2014 and is estimated to cost around rupees three lakh crore. Saudi Aramco and ADNOC, as per an agreement signed in 2018, hold a 50% stake. They also agreed to jointly build and develop the refinery and petrochemicals complex. Besides fuel, the project also proposes to develop various downstream petrochemicals to meet India’s fast-growing petrochemical demand. Initially, the project was supposed to come up at Nanar, about 20 kilometres from Barsu. However, due to strong opposition from the locals, environmental activists and the Shiv Sena, the project was denotified in 2019.
