BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 68 of 142

Correct — B, Koyali. The Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas publishes the installed capacity of every Indian refinery, and its table as on 1 April 2025 settles all four options at once, in thousand metric tonnes per year: IOC Koyali, Gujarat — 13,700; BPCL Mumbai, Maharashtra — 12,000; HPCL Mumbai, Maharashtra — 9,500; IOC Mathura, Uttar Pradesh — 8,000; IOC Barauni, Bihar — 6,000. Koyali therefore stands at 13.7 million tonnes a year and is the largest of the four by a clear margin over either of the two refineries at Mumbai's Mahul-Trombay complex, and more than double Barauni. The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali, near Vadodara, was commissioned in the 1960s on crude from the Ankleshwar and Kalol fields and has been expanded repeatedly since. One honest qualification belongs on this card: Koyali is the largest refinery among the four printed, not the largest in India. On the same PPAC table the country's biggest are Reliance's two units at Jamnagar — 33,000 and 35,200 thousand tonnes, about 68 million tonnes between them at one site — followed by IOC's own Panipat and Paradip refineries at 15,000 each, BPCL Kochi at 15,500, MRPL Mangalore and HPCL Vizag at 15,000. None of those is offered, so the question is answerable only within the four given, and inside that set Koyali wins.

• (a)Trombay — The closest competitor and the reason this question needs a source rather than a memory. Trombay refers to the Mahul refining complex in eastern Mumbai, where two separate refineries stand — BPCL's at 12,000 thousand tonnes a year and HPCL's at 9,500. Both are below Koyali's 13,700, and neither may be added to the other, because they belong to different companies and the stem asks for one refinery.
• (c)Mathura — IOC's Mathura refinery, commissioned in 1982 and famous for the debate over emissions near the Taj Mahal, stands at 8,000 thousand tonnes a year on the PPAC table — a little over half Koyali's capacity. It is the refinery most often named in environmental questions, not in capacity questions.
• (d)Barauni — Bihar's own refinery, at Begusarai, set up with Soviet assistance in the early 1960s and long the anchor of the state's industrial belt alongside the Barauni fertiliser and thermal plants. Its installed capacity is 6,000 thousand tonnes a year — the smallest of the four here and under half of Koyali's. It is on this list because a Bihar paper reaches for a Bihar answer, which is exactly the reflex the question is testing.

A refinery does not make oil; it separates and rearranges crude into usable products, and its size is quoted as the crude it can process in a year — million metric tonnes per annum, or MMTPA. India's refining sector is unusually large relative to its own consumption, because it refines for export as well as for the domestic market: the PPAC table puts all-India installed capacity at 267 million tonnes a year as on 1 April 2025, spread over about two dozen refineries. Ownership falls into three blocks — the public sector majors IOC, BPCL, HPCL, CPCL, MRPL and NRL; the private refiners Reliance at Jamnagar and Nayara at Vadinar; and joint ventures such as HMEL in Punjab. Location follows two logics. The oldest refineries sit at the oilfields, which is why Digboi in Assam, commissioned in 1901, is the oldest in India and among the oldest in the world. The newer and larger ones sit at ports, where imported crude lands — Jamnagar, Vadinar, Kochi, Mangalore, Paradip, Vizag — or at the end of a crude pipeline, which is how Barauni, Mathura and Koyali came to be inland.

Two traps sit inside this question and both are about reading the option set. First, the stem says 'maximum capacity in India', but the largest refinery in India is at Jamnagar and is not on the list, so the question can only be answered relative to the four printed — a distinction worth noticing rather than resenting, because the same shape recurs across this paper. Second, Trombay is a place with two refineries in it, and adding them together would give a false winner; capacity questions are about single refineries unless the stem says complex. If the numbers are gone, a weaker but usable route is the crude pipeline map: Koyali was built to take Gujarat's own crude from Ankleshwar and Kalol and later imported crude from the Gujarat coast, giving it room to expand that a purely pipeline-fed inland refinery such as Barauni never had. And a Bihar candidate should be alert to the reflex the fourth option is designed to catch — Barauni is the familiar name, and familiarity is not size.

• PPAC installed refining capacity as on 1 April 2025, in thousand metric tonnes: IOC Koyali 13,700; BPCL Mumbai 12,000; HPCL Mumbai 9,500; IOC Mathura 8,000; IOC Barauni 6,000.
• All-India installed refining capacity on the same table is 267,116 thousand metric tonnes — about 267 million tonnes a year.
• India's largest refining site is Jamnagar in Gujarat, where Reliance's two units are rated 33,000 and 35,200 thousand tonnes, about 68 million tonnes a year between them.
• The next largest single refineries on the PPAC table are BPCL Kochi at 15,500 and, at 15,000 each, IOC Panipat, IOC Paradip, HPCL Vizag and MRPL Mangalore.
• Barauni in Begusarai district is Bihar's only refinery; Digboi in Assam, commissioned in 1901, is India's oldest and now the smallest on the list at 650 thousand tonnes.

• Adding the two Mumbai refineries together because both stand at Mahul-Trombay. They belong to different companies and are counted separately; the stem asks for one refinery.
• Reading 'maximum capacity in India' literally and looking for Jamnagar. It is not on the option list, so the question can only be decided among the four printed.
• Picking Barauni because this is a Bihar paper. It is the smallest of the four at 6,000 thousand tonnes a year, less than half Koyali's capacity.

BPSC asks industrial geography as a superlative with four named places, and reliably plants the Bihar option among them — here Barauni — so the reflex to answer locally is itself the trap. It also likes matching Bihar districts to their industries, as the 70th CCE paper of December 2024 did with Vaishali, Bhagalpur, Jamui and Madhepura. UPSC does not ask which refinery is biggest; it asks about the processes and institutions, such as which industry uses cracking.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  India's oldest oil refinery, commissioned in 1901, is located at

  • (a)Barauni
  • (b)Digboi
  • (c)Koyali
  • (d)Trombay

  Answer(b) Digboi in Assam — one of the oldest refineries anywhere in the world, and today the smallest on India's list at about 650 thousand tonnes a year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Barauni oil refinery is located in which district of Bihar ?

  • (a)Begusarai
  • (b)Munger
  • (c)Bhagalpur
  • (d)Samastipur

  Answer(a) Begusarai — Bihar's only refinery, with an installed capacity of about 6 million tonnes a year, set up in the early 1960s with Soviet assistance.