Mumbai: Pakistan Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir reportedly plans to target Reliance Industries Ltd's Jamnagar complex located in Gujarat, and the largest and most complex single-site refinery in the world with 1.4 million barrels per day (MMBPD) crude petroleum processing capacity and a complexity index of 21.1, which is the highest in the world.
The Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited is a Fortune 500 company and also the largest private sector corporation in India.
“Ek tweet karwaya tha (I got it tweeted) with Quranic verse Surah Al-Fil (The Elephant) and a picture of (industrialist) Mukesh Ambani to show them what we will do the next time,” he said.
The verse Surah Al-Fil describes how Allah dispatched birds to drop stones on an enemy’s battle elephants, reducing them “to chewed-up straw”.
Surah Al-Fil (The Elephant) happens to be the 105th chapter of the Quran and the reference to "birds" is supposedly an indication of missiles about which Pakistani army chief Field Field Marshal Asim Munir spoke while addressing Pakistanis residing in the US.
“The Indus river is not the family property of Indians. Humein missilon ki kami nahin hai, al-Hamdulillah (we have no shortage of missiles, praise be to God),” Munir is reported to have said in Tampa, Florida.
Munir's target, Reliance Industries Ltd's Jamnagar complex, has a crude petroleum processing capacity supported by high-quality logistics infrastructure assets, including a marine facility that gives access to and allows berthing of ships ranging from gas carriers and small chemical carriers to the world’s largest crude oil (Very Large Crude Carriers or VLCCs) and product vessels.
"We (Reliance Industries Ltd) have the largest petcoke gasifier in the world, designed to run on both coal and petcoke, giving the flexibility to optimise based on raw material cost. Our petcoke gasification units allow us to extract the full value from barrels of crude oil processed, converting the bottom of the barrel into high-value energy," according to RIL's official website.
RIL successfully commissioned and stabilised the world’s largest Paraxylene complex and also successfully commissioned and achieved a design throughput of the world’s largest Refinery Off-Gas Cracker (ROGC) complex in Jamnagar, as per RIL's official website.
"We are the largest integrated petrochemical producer in India and the world’s largest integrated polyester producer. We are among the top five producers of Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) and Polypropylene (PP) in the world, and we rank 3rd globally in Paraxylene (PX) production," according to RIL's official website.
Though there are other crude oil refineries and assets which may be considered vulnerable, the sheer size of RIL's Jamnagar complex makes it the powerhouse of India's petroleum refining sector, with an annual capacity of processing 33 million tonnes of crude petroleum oil, which is 12% of India's total refining capacity. It is also a major exporter of refined petroleum products to the rest of the world, which has wider implications for the global market.
In October 1997, it was reported that Reliance Petroleum Ltd had purchased the largest insurance cover ever issued in the country and insured its 15 million tonne Jamnagar refinery project for Rs 9,000 crore.
Oriental Insurance Company had picked up 80% of the business, while New India Insurance provided the remaining insurance cover. However, the two public sector insurance companies retained only around 4% of the insurance cover and reportedly resold the rest to international re-insurers like Swiss Re and Munich Re, besides half a dozen professional reinsurers with triple A ratings, back in October 1997.
General Insurance Corporation (GIC), which is the holding company for all public sector insurance companies in India, had also picked up a small share of the re-insurance business. Though GIC initially booked 100%, the re-insurance limit was brought down to 96%.
In October 1997, the insurance policy for the Jamnagar complex was at a base premium price of 2.2%, according to Oriental Insurance sources. However, Reliance Petroleum was supposed to pay only Rs 30 crore as premium for the 30-month construction period, which began in September 1997, even as the first consignment of refinery plant machinery was moved into the project site in Jamnagar.
Later, in early January 2018, it was reported that Reliance Industries (RIL) had purchased an insurance cover above Rs 3-lakh crore for its refinery and petrochemical plants located at Jamnagar and Hazira in Gujarat from New India Assurance and other co-insurers with support from GIC Reinsurance, which bore the bulk of the risk.
However, given the size of the risk, GIC Re had sold half the risk to other global reinsurers.
