GAIL India will invest ₹6 billion, or about $63.1 million, to build a heating unit at its Ratnagiri liquefied natural gas terminal, a project the company expects to complete by June 2027. The facility is intended to allow the terminal to gasify LNG at its full capacity of 5 million tonnes per annum.
R. K. Singhal, GAIL’s business development director, announced the investment while speaking to reporters at an industry event. He said the Ratnagiri terminal is currently operating at about 50% of its capacity because the heating unit required to convert super-chilled LNG into gas is not ready.
The heating unit is central to the terminal’s ability to process LNG for onward use. LNG is stored in a super-chilled liquid form and must be warmed during the regasification process before it can enter gas infrastructure in gaseous form. GAIL’s planned investment will create dedicated heating capability at the facility.
The Ratnagiri terminal had previously been using waste heat from a power plant operated by another entity to support the gasification process. That power plant is no longer functional, Singhal said. The loss of that heat source has left the terminal operating at roughly half of its stated annual capacity.
To support operations, GAIL is also building a small captive power plant at the site. According to Singhal, the captive facility will generate the heat required by the LNG terminal. This arrangement will reduce the terminal’s dependence on the non-operational power plant that had earlier supplied waste heat, although the company’s statement did not provide details of the captive plant’s generation capacity or cost.
The investment highlights the importance of supporting systems in determining how much capacity an energy terminal can actually use. While the Ratnagiri facility has a stated capacity of 5 million tonnes per annum, its current throughput is constrained by the absence of the heating unit rather than by the terminal’s headline capacity alone.
Once the heating unit is completed, GAIL expects to operate the Ratnagiri terminal at its full capacity. The company did not provide an interim construction schedule, details of the contracting arrangement or an expected date for commissioning beyond the June 2027 completion target. The next major milestone is therefore the completion of the heating and captive power facilities by that deadline.
