Honeywell unit eyes India’s $4.3-bn effort to clean air

July 1: Refining technology companies Honeywell UOP and Technip see growth opportunities in India as oil demand booms and the government seeks cleaner fuels within four years to tackle air pollution.

France’s Technip projects as much as 20% annual sales growth in Asia’s third-largest economy, while UOP India, a unit of New Jersey-based HoneywellInternational,expectsan increase of at least 15%.“That’s exciting for us,” UOP India’s managing director Steven C Gimre said in an interview near New Delhi on Monday. “We’re in the process of bidding on some projects that are coming up, and we’ve also signed up some projects.”

Technip India’s senior vicepresident Shekhar Balvalli said India is fast-tracking improvements at state-run refiners so that petrol and diesel comply with a local equivalent of European Euro 6 emission standards by April 2020.

While refiners plan a R28,800crore ($4.3-billion) outlay on upgrades, the timeline is aggressive in a nation where infrastructure deadlines have slipped.

“Fromthecontextof time,it’s very difficult unless very professionallymanaged,”saidDeepak Mahurkar, leader for the oil and gas team at PricewaterhouseCoopers in India.

“They are very, very complicated projects.” Gimre said UOP is tying up with engineers such as Larsen & Toubro to prefabricate the refinery units that staterun companies need by 2020, a modelthathearguedallowsfora speedier shift to making cleaner fuel.

India is expected to surpass Japan as the world’s thirdlargest oil user this year and will be the fastest-growing crude consumer in the world through 2040, the Paris-based International The nation’s refineries plan to add over 55 million tonnes of annualcapacityattheirexisting Energy Agency estimates. refineries by 2020, according to the annual reports and websites of Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation. The government has also announced a plan to build a 60-mta-year refinery on the west coast.

Asthesametime,officialsare grappling with some of the worst air pollution in the world, stoked by everything from tailpipe emissions to crop burning and smoke-stack power plants. “We’re seeing a big marketontherefiningsideduetoupcoming opportunities for BS-VI fuel,” Balvalli said, referring to the Bharat Stage VI emissions standards.

The government brought forward the introduction of BS-VI to 2020 from 2024 on increasing concern about the high levels of toxic PM2.5 particles in the air.

The benchmark seeks to reduce nitrous oxide and particulate matter such as sulphur.

Bloomberg