The Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL) to explore the possibility of storing ADNOC crude oil at ISPRL’s underground oil storage facility at Padur in Karnataka, India, which has a 2.5 million t (~17 million bbls) capacity.
Under the MoU, ADNOC could store crude in two compartments at Padur.
The MoU with ISPRL, an Indian government-owned company mandated to store crude oil for emergency needs, follows the arrival, on 4 November, of the final shipment of the initial delivery of ADNOC crude to be stored in another ISPRL underground facility at Mangalore, also in Karnataka, which will store 5.86 million bbls of ADNOC crude oil.
ADNOC is the only foreign oil and gas company, so far, to invest by way of crude oil in India’s strategic petroleum reserves programme. It is also a stakeholder, along with Saudi Aramco, and a consortium of Indian state-run companies, in one of India’s largest refinery and petrochemicals complexes, to be constructed at Ratnagiri in Maharashtra.