Nagapattinam: Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for CPCL’s Cauvery Basin Refinery expansion project at Panangudi in Thirumarugal block in Nagapattinam district through videoconference on Wednesday. The CPCL refinery will be set up on 1,300 acres at a cost of Rs 31,580 crore. The construction work of the refinery will employ a maximum of 25K people, and the operation will employ 5K people.

The Cauvery Basin Refinery was set up in Panangudi in 1993. It is a group company of Indian Oil Corporation, an Indian state owned oil and Gas Corporation headquartered in Chennai. It has a refinery of 1 million metric tonnes capacity in Nagapattinam. The company is expanding its unit at a capacity of 9 million metric tonnes. The new refinery is set to be operational by 2024.  The operation will provide jobs to 5K people in areas such as ancillary units, support services and other agencies, the official said.  The direct workforce will be about 600, and indirect workforce, about 2,000 in refinery operations, administrations and other facilities.

The refinery will ensure socio-economic development in the region through skill development, transport, communication, education, and small scale industrial development.  The refinery will also include a crude processing unit and other secondary processing units to process petroleum products. It will have a polypropylene unit as part of petrochemical integration with a potential to increase petrochemicals units in future.