October 18, 2013 [Economic Times] - Five companies, including Vopak, Adani Ports and United Liner Agencies (ULA), have shown interest in constructing the Rs 1,800-crore liquid terminal for the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), its chairmanin-charge NN Kumar told ET.
Apart from ULA and Adani, Aegis Logistics, IMC and Netherlands’s Vopak are expected to submit their applications on October 21, which is the deadline, said Kumar.
“The terminal will handle edible oil, chemicals, liquid fertilisers as well as petroleum, oil and lubricants (POL),” said NN Kumar. “There is a great demand for handling chemical and edible oil. Mumbai Port Trust primarily handles POL (petroleum, oil and lubricants),” he added.
The liquid terminal, which will handle 15.5 million tonnes per annum and is expected to be built in two phases, will take about five to eight years to be constructed.
It will have a liquid jetty and a tank farm spread over 70 hectares. While JNPT is India’s largest container port with 4.1 million twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) container capacity, it lags behind other ports in providing terminals for liquid cargo.
Even though the port has a twinberth liquid cargo terminal run by the state oil refiners Bharat Petroleum and Indian Oil Corp, the capacity is just 5.5 million tonnes with a waiting period running into about six to seven days.
JNPT is expanding through public-private partnerships and hopes to reach a capacity of 10 million TEU by 2017. The bidding process to construct the fourth container terminal, which will be 2,000-meter long and add 4.8 million TEU of capacity per annum, is currently on, and the names of the qualifying bidders will be announced in 10 days, said Kumar.
The qualifying bidders will be then given a price bidding form by mid-November while JNPT will seek security clearance for these companies from the Ministry of Shipping. Kumar said the winning bid should be announced by mid-January.
