Reliance Industries has ramped up its production of medical-grade oxygen from 0 to 1,000 MT per day, constituting more than 11 per cent of the country’s total medical grade liquid oxygen production.
This oxygen is being provided free-of-cost to several state governments to bring immediate relief to over one lakh patients daily, the company said.
Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, Reliance has supplied over 55,000 MT of medical-grade liquid oxygen across the country.
In addition to the production of medical-grade liquid oxygen, the other challenge has been to quickly overcome the transportation bottleneck in the supply of liquid oxygen to various parts of the country. This necessitated increasing the loading capacity for its safe and quick transportation.
To achieve this, Reliance engineers made logistical modifications to rail and road transport, such as laying parallel lines, using hoses, and loading up liquid tankers through pressure differential since liquid oxygen pumps cannot be installed at short notice.
In another innovation, Reliance converted nitrogen tankers into transport trucks for medical grade oxygen through innovative and safe processes that were approved by the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization (PESO), the relevant regulatory body of the government of India.
Reliance organised the airlifting of 24 ISO containers into India from Saudi Arabia, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Thailand, adding 500 MT of new transportation capacity for liquid oxygen. These ISO containers will help in removing the transport constraints for medical-grade liquid oxygen in the country.
Mukesh Ambani, CMD, Reliance Industries, said, “There is an immediate need to maximise India’s production and transportation capacities for medical grade oxygen. I am proud of our engineers at Jamnagar who have worked tirelessly, with a great sense of patriotic urgency, to meet this new challenge.”
Nita Ambani, founder-chairperson of Reliance Foundation, said: “Our country is going through an unprecedented crisis. Our plants at our Jamnagar refinery have been repurposed overnight to produce medical-grade liquid oxygen that is being distributed across India.”