The Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Shri S. Jaipal Reddy informed the Lok  Sabha in written reply today that oil industry has invested over Rs 32,000 crore in upgrading facilities in refineries for production of BS-III/IV auto fuels.  He added that in line with the Auto Fuel Policy, Lead was phased out from Petrol completely from 01.02.2000 and BS-IV grade auto fuels in major cities and BS-III grade auto fuels in the rest of the country were introduced in 2010. 

Shri Reddy also informed that adoption of modern technologies by Indian refineries has helped in increasing the distillate yield, quality upgradation of petrol/diesel and reduction in specific energy consumption. The industry average distillate yield (% wt. on crude) has improved from 75.0% in 2009-10 to 76.8 %(provisional) in 2011-12. Similarly the industry average of specific energy (MBN*) has come down from 68 in 2009-10 to 63 (provisional) in 2011-12. (MBN*-MBTU/BBL/NRGF, where the term MBTU refers to total heat value of fuel and loss in thousand BTU, BBL refers to barrel of crude processed and NRGF is a derived factor that depends upon actual intake in both primary and secondary processing units as per industry standard).

            The Minister emphasised that Indian refineries have been continuously upgrading their technologies in line with the Auto Fuel Policy and as per their operational requirement.

  He also said that apart from primary processing technologies, viz., Crude Oil Fractionation by Atmospheric Distillation and Vacuum Distillation for initial separation, the major modern process technologies employed across PSU refineries for producing petroleum products include:

I.  Secondary/Upgradation Technologies for yield improvement:

    (i)   Thermal cracking processes, viz., Visbreaking, Delayed Coking

(ii)     Fluidised Catalytic Cracking, INDMAX Technology

(iii)    Hydrocracking

II. Quality UpgradationTechnologies :

    (i)   Catalytic Reforming, Isomerisation, Alkylation, Prime G for meeting the quality specifications of Petrol w.r.t. octane number, benzene content, aromatics, olefins, sulphur, distillation etc.

    (ii)   Diesel Hydro-desulphurisation (DHDS), Diesel Hydro-treating (DHDT) for reduction of sulphur & PAH (Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons) and cetane number improvement of diesel.

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RCJ/RKS