All Steamed Up

Apollo Tyres has signed an agreement with Gail India Ltd., India’s largest natural gas company, to cooperate in a ‘steam conversion project’. The deal, signed on July 10, not only falls under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) criteria but will also lead to lower gas consumption and increased energy efficiency for Apollo.

The agreement was signed by Apollo chief – legal Shri Mahesh Sharma and Gail director of marketing Shri B C Tripathi at Gail’s office in New Delhi. Also present for the occasion were numerous senior officials including Gail chairman and managing director Dr. U D Choubey, Apollo chairman and managing director Shri Onkar S Kanwar, and Dr. Amit Mitra, Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

The project will be implemented by Gail at its Vaghodia Compressor Station in the western state of Gujarat and will provide steam to Apollo within 24 months at a cost of around £4.3 million. The duration of the Agreement is 15 years and commercial supply will start from July 2009, with an annual contracted quantity of 436,800 tonnes.

Speaking on the occasion, Apollo’s Shri Onkar S Kanwar termed the development’s public – private partnership in addressing global environment issues as historic, referring to it as a new step in the direction of contributing to a cleaner environment and reducing emissions. Gail’s Dr. U D Choubey said that the project is going to be a new chapter and a good beginning not only for Gail but also for India. He also emphasised the need to proactively address the issue of greenhouse gas emissions by the nation’s corporates.

The project, which employs waste heat recovered from the gas turbine exhaust outlets at Gail’s facilities, will permit Apollo to generate 4 MW of power and enable the two companies save around 935 Million kilocalories of energy in producing process steam, thereby also avoiding formation of 55000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. The Apollo Tyres plant in Limda, located close to Gail’s compressor station, will supply the required water and will in return receive a supply of steam from Gail for both tyre manufacturing and auxiliary power generation. At present the Apollo Tyres plant consumes approximately 74,000 standard cubic metres of reclassified liquid natural gas each day as fuel for their plant requirements. Once the project is implemented, consumption will be reduced to 40 per cent of this amount, a substantial saving on overheads for the tyremaker.