Only two weeks have passed since the war started between America and Iran, but its impact has now reached the homes of India as well. In city after city people are standing in lines at gas agencies. Hotels and restaurants have been closed in some places and some will be closed in the coming days. Because the supply of the gas with which food is cooked in our homes has stopped. And now people have started asking why our government did not store gas. So let us try to find the answer to why we are not able to store LPG like petrol and diesel.
Actually, crude oil from which petrol and diesel are made is easy to store. You can store crude oil by digging pits, you can store it in big drums and you can also store it in any pipeline. But LPG is a slightly poisonous gas. Storing it is very difficult and expensive, because it has to be stored in liquid form through pressure. This requires special infrastructure, which includes pressurized cylinders, spherical tanks, mounted storage bullets and underground caves. Making these is an expensive task, on which investment has not been made. However, India has two such places where LPG is stored.
The first place is Visakhapatnam and the second place is Mangaluru. There are underground caves at both these places, where LPG is stored so that buffer stock is available in case of any danger. These caves are called ‘Rock Caverns’. The capacity of LPG cavern built in Mangaluru is about 80,000 tonnes. The capacity of LPG cavern built in Visakhapatnam is about 60,000 tonnes. This means that India currently has the capacity to store only 1.4 lakh tonnes of gas. And if this capacity is seen according to India’s daily consumption, then this gas can hardly provide backup to India for two days. In such a situation, the government is currently preparing to build more caves in Mangaluru in addition to the already existing capacity. Surveys are being conducted to create new ‘caverns’ on the coasts of Gujarat and Odisha so that imported gas can be stored there. But this is a process of the future, while the crisis is still of the present.
Rest of the country, there are more than 200 LPG bottling plants of gas companies like Indian Oil, HP and BPCL, where there are vertical and horizontal tanks. These are called bullets. India’s largest LPG stock is stored in these bullets. Apart from this, the refineries where LPG gas is manufactured also have storage tanks where LPG is stored. The gas that is sent from the refinery to the bottling plants through trucks or other means, has some storage in them and some storage is also present in the LPG pipelines. Apart from this, India has no other place for LPG storage. And this has been the mistake of every government. Because due to the continuous supply of LPG, no government has paid any attention towards making LPG storage, the result is that within 14 days of the war, the effect has reached the kitchens.
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