NRL ready to ship out cargo via Bangladesh
Silghat port comes to life, vessel flag off soon
By Wasbir Hussain
NUMALIGARH, June 15: An oil refinery, located in the wilds of Assam, could well provide the ?fuel of life? to a historic port in the Brahmaputra, that has been virtually abandoned for years.
The dilapidated river port at Silghat, around 100 km west of here, has sprung to life ever since a private vessel from Kolkata arrived and anchored there a few days ago. The vessel has been hired by the Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) to ship a consignment of Euro III Diesel for the Kolkata market.
Top NRL sources said that the vessel with a 1,500 tonne cargo of Euro III Diesel, valued at Rs 4 crore, will set sail in a day or two. It is expected to reach Budge Budge, its destination near Kolkata, via Bangladesh, in 15 days.
"We are trying out an alternate mode of transport to evacuate our products," an NRL official said. Two more consignments of the same product are to follow as part of this trial run to try and ascertain whether products from the 3 million tonne state-of-the-art refinery could be evacuated through the river route.
NRL has an eye on the Bangladesh market. The country has a refinery at Chittagong that processes 1.5 million tonne of crude per year. Oil industry sources said Bangladesh has a shortfall of 1.5 million tonnes of petroleum products.
It is being thought here that when the present cargo of Euro III Diesel passes through ports close to Dhaka, it could create an indirect impact in Bangladeshi oil circles on the possibility of importing petro products from NRL.
NRL officials had held exploratory discussions with the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation, a state owned oil company, a couple of years ago. The talks had not made much progress. NRL officials are once again expected to resume the discussions with the oil company in Bangladesh.
NRL, in collaboration with the Inland Waterways Authority, has made makeshift arrangements to make Silghat suitable for the current shipment. Around Rs 20 lakh is understood to have been spent to make the defunct port suitable for loading of the cargo, that has been driven to Silghat from the NRL storage depots.
An alternate mode of transport is important for NRL as it is having a major problem in evacuating its products. There is a perennial shortage of railways rakes to ship out the products.
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