Essar Oil, a subsidiary of Essar Energy, announced the commissioning of the Hydrogen Manufacturing Unit (HMU), the third new unit as part of the Phase 1 expansion at its Vadinar Refinery. The company will commission six additional units by March, 2012, thus completing a Rs 8,310-crore expansion project to increase the refinery's capacity to 375,000 barrels per day (bpd) i.e. 18 million metric tonne per annum (mmtpa) from 300,000 bpd or 14 mmtpa. It plans to enhance its complexity almost two-fold from 6.1 at present to 11.8. An optimisation project is also under execution to increase the plant capacity to 405,000 bpd (20 mmtpa) by September 2012.
