Ahmedabad: The Gujarat high court on Thursday directed the Centre to file an affidavit in a week’s time explaining why the court should not take punitive action against responsible persons for noncompliance of its order to supply CNG to Ahmedabad at a rate supplied to Mumbai and Delhi.

On July 25 last year, the bench headed by Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya ordered for conversion of all public vehicles to CNG and asked the Centre to provide gas to the city at the price at which it was supplied to metro cities.

Indraprastha Gas, the sole supplier of CNG in Delhi-NCR, has revised the price of CNG in Delhi by R1.55 per kg to R39.90 due to increased input gas price and related taxes. Consumers will have to pay R39.90 per kg in Delhi and R45.10 per kg in the Noida, Greater Noida and Ghaziabad areas.

The company had last increased the price in September. “The 4% revision in CNG price would result in an increase of R1.55 per kg in the consumer price of CNG in Delhi and R1.80 per kg in the consumer price of CNG in Noida, Greater Noida and Ghaziabad,” the company statement said.

The ministry of petroleum and natural gas has allowed power companies to club or divert the allocated gas between two or more power plants of the same company so as to improve the plant load factor and increase power generation.

Following a significant drop in the plant load factor due to acute shortage of gas, the power companies had asked the government to relax the gas allocation policy.

Fertiliser majors waiting to make investments in new urea plants have reasons to cheer as the government has promised, subject to a ceiling, it would cover the additional cost from natural gas imports given the paucity of domestic gas.

Currently, the Asian spot price of the feedstock, which forms over three-fourths of the cost of production of fertilisers, is $14 per million metric British thermal unit (mmBtu), while the domestic gas is priced at $4.2/mmBtu. The government has said it would bear the difference in costs arising out of the fertiliser companies importing gas to meet their needs, to the extent the imported gas price is below $14/mmBtu.

The fertiliser ministry has opposed Reliance Industries' demand for hiking the KG-D6 gas price in line with the Asian LNG spot price, effective from April 2014. The ministry wants the price to be not more than $8/mmBtu.

RIL pitched for the gas price, post March 2014, to be about 10% below the spot price of LNG imported from Qatar — $12-13 at current rates. According to sources, during discussions with the government, the fertiliser ministry contended that such a price (on which consumers will have to pay an extra $1-1.5 to cover transporation charges and marketing margins) is not viable for the fertiliser industry whose output is highly subsidised, adding that any such move will cause a burden on the exchequer.

The Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd, (IFFCO) Paradeep Unit has been Awarded as “Water Efficient Unit and received "9th National Award for Excellence in Water Management 2012” by Confedera

Policy aims to incentivise fertilizer cos to set up new plants

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), on Thursday, approved a urea investment policy, which is likely to incentivise fertilizer companies to set up new plants and expand existing capacity. India imports over 30 per cent of its urea requirement and the policy aims at reducing that. But it is unlikely to have any impact on existing prices. “The new urea investment policy has been cleared,” sources said after the CCEA meeting here.

MumbaiZuari Agro Chemicals and Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) Maritime City on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to set up an integrated Di-ammonium Phosphate (DAP) manufacturing facility in UAE with an estimated project cost of $800 million.

Zuari Agro Chemicals, the flagship of $3 billion Adventz Group, is a leading fertiliser conglomerate in India. The project envisages setting up an integrated DAP unit, along with its attendant utilities including a power plant, a private jetty and a desalination plant with an estimated project cost of $800 million.

Agartala: State-owned ONGC’s proposed gas-based fertiliser plant in Tripura would meet the growing shortage of urea in the eastern and northeastern states of India and neighbouring Bangladesh, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar said here Wednesday.

ONGC in association with Tata Chemicals and the Tripura government would set up a Rs.5,000 crore plant in northern Tripura.

The Board for Industrial & Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) will take up hearing on the closed fertiliser plant of Fertiliser Corporation of India (FCI) on October 30.

BIFR has directed FCI to submit all audited accounts- balance sheets and profit & loss accounts along with auditor reports from the date of sickness to the present period. The board has also asked FCI’s chief executive and one of its directors fully acquainted with the closed unit’s case to be present at the time of hearing.