No disruption in Bangladesh operations, says Assam refinery

Numaligarh Refinery Limited unaffected by political turmoil in Bangladesh, expanding operations in neighboring countries, including Myanmar.

“The political upheaval in Bangladesh and anti-India sentiments have not affected operations in the neighbouring country,” an Assam-based public sector refinery and energy retailer claimed on Friday (August 30, 2024).

The Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL), based in eastern Assam’s Golaghat district, is a product of the Assam Accord of August 1985, which ended a violent six-year agitation seeking to eject “illegal immigrants” from the State.

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“There has been no impact of the situation in Bangladesh on the Indo-Bangladesh Friendship Pipeline or our operations in the country. Rather, we are scaling up operations in northern Bangladesh from our Siliguri terminal and northeastern Bangladesh from terminals developed near (southern Assam’s) Silchar,” NRL’s Chairman R. Rath said. He is also the Chairman cum Managing Director of Oil India Limited, the largest shareholder of the refinery.

In March 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his former Bangladesh counterpart inaugurated the pipeline – the first cross-border energy supply line between the two countries – to transport 1 million metric tonnes per annum (MMTPA) of high-speed diesel to Bangladesh.

From its refinery, the NRL has pipelines up to Siliguri in northern West Bengal, from where diesel is piped to Parbatipur in northern Bangladesh. Before work on this pipeline started in 2018, NRL was marketing petroleum products in this part of Bangladesh — not easily accessible from the southern part of the country due to a network of rivers — since 2015.

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