Indian Oil Eyes Processing Bio-naphtha For Petrochemicals: Chairman

By Mohi Narayan

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian Oil Corp., the country's top refiner, said on Friday it is looking to decarbonise its petrochemical feedstocks by introducing bio-naphtha at its crackers.

"To attain sustainability, bio-based feedstocks such as bio-naphtha and bio-ethanol are being envisaged as the natural transition for the petrochemical industry," the company's Chairman Shrikant Madhav Vaidya said at Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference, without providing a timeline.

Bio-naphtha is typically obtained from hydro-treatment of used vegetable and cooking oils.

"It is under research and development at our Faridabad facility in northern India... we have kept the used cooking oil pathway open but we're trying to get it via bio-ethanol," the company's executive director of petrochemicals, A. S. Sahney, told Reuters on the sidelines of the event.

(Reporting by Mohi Narayan; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)