India's state-owned Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd. has restarted production of petcoke after the authorities lifted the restrictions imposed on pumping river water for industrial use, refinery director M Venkatesh said Wednesday.
Due to acute water shortage in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka in the last week of April, the government stopped industrial units from pumping river water for their use and MRPL's coker had to be shut temporarily.
"All the units, including the coker are currently running at full capacity," Venkatesh said.
Water availability had improved with the arrival of the monsoons, he said.
A Chennai-based end-user source said that there was a huge demand for petcoke but supply was limited and buyers had been waiting for MRPL to restart output. His company buys 100-200 mt/day of petcoke from MRPL currently.
Another end-user with cement plants said that he was yet to get any petcoke from MRPL as volume were still limited.
MRPL has the capacity to produce around 0.9 million mt/year of fuel grade petcoke and it meets the demand of cement plants in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
MRPL was selling petcoke at around Rupees 4,850/mt for June, sources said.
