The commissioning of India’s strategic oil storage facility — being constructed to avoid oil supply disruptions during any emergency — is likely to get delayed.
“There are some issues we faced to build the underground cavern at Vishkhapatnam,” Rajan K Pillai, CEO, ISPRL, the firm building the strategic storages, said on Tuesday.
“While a smaller compartment with 0.3 million tonnes will be commissioned as per schedule in March 2013, the bigger one million tonne cavern would be commissioned only a year later,” he said.
The strategic crude oil reserves are meant to take care of oil security concerns of the country and could be released to meet contingencies arising out of supply disruptions and cushion abnormal increase in prices. The first of the 5.33 million tonnes of storages are being built at Vishkhapatnam, Mangalore and Padur, which were to be completed by 2013.