Adani Group and French company TotalEnergies’ newly built Rs 6,000 crore LNG import facility at Dhamra on the Odisha coast has received its first-ever shipment of liquefied natural gas - a fuel that will be used to make steel, produce fertilizers and turned into CNG and cooking gas.
Qatari ship Milaha Ras Laffan docked at Dhamra Port on April 1, bringing in 2.6 trillion British thermal units of natural gas in its frozen form (LNG) which will be used to commission the facility, officials said.
“On Utkal Diwas, Odisha’s formation day, Adani Ports and SEZ is privileged to welcome to Dhamra Port its first cargo of LNG aboard the ‘Milaha Ras Laffan’,” Karan Adani, CEO of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, wrote on Linkedin. “This is a huge leap forward not only in access to clean and affordable energy but also in decarbonising India’s energy sector.”
Commissioning and testing operations will take up to 45 days and commercial operations are expected to start thereafter. The start of the 5 million tonne per annum LNG import terminal is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to boost natural gas use in the country’s energy mix to 15 per cent by 2030 from the current 6.3 per cent.
Dhamra is the only LNG import terminal in eastern India and only second on the entire east coast. The country’s five other terminals are on its western coast.