India’s first-ever cross-border oil pipeline with Bangladesh is ready to be launched on March 18 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina by video conferencing, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister A Ok Momen stated on Friday.
The 130-km-long Indo-Bangla Friendship Pipeline (IBFPL) pipeline is a part of a number of bilateral measures to enable Bangladesh to faucet into bigger volumes of power to meet its rising home calls for. It would carry excessive velocity diesel from (*18*) Refinery Limited (NRL) in Assam.
The pipeline would carry gas from NRL’s advertising and marketing terminal in Siliguri, West Bengal to the state-run Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation’s (BPC) oil depot in Parbatipur metropolis in Dinajpur District of the neighbouring nation. The custody switch level can be on the Banglabandha International border level within the suburbs of Siliguri. BPC would have sole advertising and marketing rights inside Bangladesh.
The ground-breaking ceremony for the IBFPL was held in September 2018 and the venture has been carefully monitored by the Prime Minister’s Offices of each nations since.
Constructed at a price of Rs 377.08 crore, the bilateral venture has been financed by a grant in assist of Rs 285.24 crore by India and Rs 91.84 crore by NRL. Only 5 km of the pipeline would run inside Indian territory, the remaining would run via Bangladesh.
One million metric tonnes every year (MMTPA) can probably be transported via the pipeline.
Like all different nations within the subcontinent, refined petroleum accounts for the biggest chunk of Bangladesh’s import invoice.
As of 2020, Bangladesh was the world’s forty second largest importer of refined petroleum, importing $2.64 billion of the product, in accordance to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), a world information visualisation website for worldwide commerce information created by the Macro Connections group on the MIT Media Lab.
The identical 12 months, Singapore, China, India, Malaysia, and Thailand had been its largest sources.
Other initiatives quickly
The profitable launch of the venture is probably going to give a fillip to comparable bilateral endeavours. India has additionally been offering grant help to Bangladesh for varied infrastructure initiatives, together with development of Akhaura-Agartala rail hyperlink, dredging of inland waterways in Bangladesh.
NRL and BPC had, in April 2017, inked a long-term settlement for promoting High Speed Diesel (HSD) from India to Bangladesh via the IBFPL. Later, in October that 12 months, the state-run NRL signed one other 15-year settlement with the BPC for export of fuel oil (diesel) to the neighboring nation.
On the opposite hand, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) is in talks with the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) of Bangladesh to facilitate the cargo of petroleum, oil, and lubricants from Assam and Meghalaya to Tripura by way of Bangladesh. Talks picked up tempo final 12 months after floods and landslides devastated the communication hyperlinks within the Northeastern area.
The distance for transporting various kinds of gas from IOC’s Betkuchi depot in Guwahati to Dharmanagar depot in Tripura by way of Bangladesh will likely be 376 km, together with 137 km contained in the neighbouring nation, in opposition to 579 km via the Meghalaya-Barak Valley route.
In September, 2016, IOC had flagged off seven tankers carrying 84,000 litres of kerosene and diesel from its Guwahati depot to Tripura via Bangladesh for the primary time, to keep away from the dilapidated nationwide freeway in Assam.