Ellenbarrie to strengthen distribution network

To invest Rs 40-50 crore to add more storage, transport tankers and cylinders

Hyderabad: Ellenbarrie Industrial Gases Limited (EIGL), an industrial and medical gas company with manufacturing units in multiple locations including Jadcherla in Telangana, is now looking to add more storage and transport tankers and cylinders.

“In the next couple of years, we will invest about Rs 40-50 crore in strengthening our distribution assets,’’ EIGL Executive Director Varun Agarwal told Telangana Today.

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The Jadcherla unit has a capacity of around 130 MT per day. The company makes oxygen, nitrogen, argon, ethylene, hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Medical use apart, oxygen is used in manufacturing and cutting of steel, construction, and allied segments. The nitrogen made in this plant finds its way to various pharmaceutical industries around Hyderabad, he said.

New plant

The company commenced work on a 600 MT per day unit at Kurnool. This involves an investment of about Rs 250 crore and the plant is expected to go online in the second half of 2022. It will mainly cater to the growing clientele in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka. This will also cut dependence on eastern India for oxygen, he said.

“We anticipate a huge demand from Pharma City. Also, a lot of solar cell and module units are coming up in Telangana. They will up the demand for industrial gases,” said Agarwal.

“One of the challenges during the Covid second wave was that liquid oxygen was brought in from eastern States, which have surplus production. It is not ideal to transport gases for thousands of km in the long term. The solution lies in setting up more facilities in South India,” he said, explaining why the new plant was being considered. Its tankers were also used to airlift liquid oxygen to Hyderabad during Covid.

On the trends, he said there was a shortage of industrial oxygen as the medical demand peaked because of Covid. “The Central and State Governments asked manufacturers to divert the entire oxygen produced for medical use. That was important considering the situation then. As the number of cases has gone down, the medical demand has come down and oxygen supply to industries has resumed,” he said.

“We expect the number of liquid-oxygen consuming hospitals to rise as governments have begun building centralised gas pipelines. This is an opportunity for us,” the official said about the demand-drivers.

The company added a high-purity hydrogen plant in West Bengal. It has production facilities in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

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