Adani's Odisha LNG terminal gets 1st cargo

Adani Group and French company TotalEnergies' newly built Rs 6,000 crore LNG import facility at Dhamra on the Odisha coast has received its first ever shipment of liquefied natural gas - a fuel that will be used to make steel, produce fertilizers and turned into CNG and cooking gas, helping change the landscape of Eastern India. Qatari ship 'Milaha Ras Laffan' docked at Dhamra Port on April 1 morning, bringing in 2.6 trillion British thermal units of natural gas in its frozen form (LNG) which will be used to commission the facility, officials said.

Commissioning and testing operations will take up to 45 days and commercial operations are expected to start thereafter. The start of the 5 million tonne per annum LNG import terminal is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's plan to boost natural gas use in the country's energy mix to 15 per cent by 2030 from current 6.3 per cent.

Dhamra is the only LNG import terminal in eastern India and only second on the entire east coast. The country's five other terminals are on its western coast (three in Gujarat, one each in Maharashtra and Kerala).

Adani Total Pvt Ltd, where Adani Group and TotalEnergies SE have 50 per cent stake each, will use the cargo received on April 1 to do safety check and test systems, officials said.

After all checks, the terminal would be ready to start commercial op-erations with an expected 2.2-2.3 million tonne of LNG expected to be imported in the first year and a gradual ramp-up to full capacity in the next.