Which is the oil refinery having maximum capacity in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q68 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q68 — Geography PYQ with Answer