Reliance Industries Ltd.

RIL gears up to produce green hydrogen in two years

August 03, 2023

Reliance Industries (RIL) is laying down infrastructure for disbursement of green hydrogen from its proposed plant in Gujarat as it prepares to begin production of the fuel by 2025, three officials aware of the development said. The company, which has received 74,750 hectares of land parcel in Gujarat on a 40-year lease for its green hydrogen project, is tying up with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for supply of green hydrogen and laying the groundwork to retail the same through its Jio – BP outlets, they said. “RIL is setting up a green hydrogen dispensation infrastructure,” an industry official said on condition of anonymity.

“The company is targeting production of green hydrogen by 2025 and when that happens, it needs a ready infrastructure for offtake of that green hydrogen. There will be more such measures from RIL going forward,". RIL did not respond to an email sent on Tuesday till press time on Wednesday. The Mukesh Ambani-led company is investing $10 billion in capex for building its new energy ecosystem. Over the past seven months, it has tied up with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to supply green hydrogen. This February, RIL and Ashok Leyland unveiled India’s first hydrogen internal combustion engine (H2ICE) technology solution for heavy-duty trucks.

Later that month, RIL with Olectra Greentech, a subsidiary of Megha Engineering and Infrastructures (MEIL), unveiled a hydrogen bus. Olectra Greentech aims at commercially launching these buses within a year. In July, RIL collaborated with Bharat Benz for India's first intercity luxury concept coach powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology.

H2ICE is a combustion engine that uses hydrogen or a mixture of hydrogen and diesel fuel. The advantage with this engine is that there is no need to make changes to the power train, or the assembly of every component that thrusts your vehicle into motion. So, the existing power train can be used with minor modifications to convert vehicles to a hydrogen vehicle. All these vehicles, RIL’s partners said, can travel approximately 400 km on a single hydrogen fill and can facilitate long-distance travel between cities on clean fuel. Hydrogen fill for this range coverage takes just about 15 minutes. These vehicles will undergo extensive trials, validation and safety trials over next 12 months, they said. Through its association with Ashok Leyland, RIL plans to retrofit the engines for Ashok Leyland's fleet of trucks before retrofitting the fleet of other service providers. RIL contracts a fleet of nearly 45,000 trucks every year to move goods for its refining and marketing operations. It wants to power them with green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen is the cleanest form of fuel when produced through renewable sources of energy. RIL aims to produce green hydrogen at $1 per kilogram by 2030. The current production economics of green hydrogen works out to be around $8-9 per kilogram as compared to less than $4 per kilograms for other traditional fuels and feedstocks. “The domestic use cases for green hydrogen will remain confined to small pilots,” said Barnik Chitran Maitra, managing partner, India & South Asia, of consulting firm Arthur D Little. “We expect the producers to sign up with global shipping firms, international transmission system operators, and international power generators which are likely to replace fossil fuel with green hydrogen over the next five years.” RIL also plans to retail green hydrogen through its Jio-BP retail outlets.

The company has around 1,500 retail outlets, which its plans to expand to 5,000. Satyakam Arya, managing director of Daimler India Commercial Vehicles, said the BharatBenz Hydrogen Fuel Cell luxury coach concept that it developed with RIL is the most recent example of conducting an advanced engineering study to decipher the market requirements, product capability and practical challenges, and use the findings in making the product and technology more robust. “The emerging industry landscape also throws up other challenges — investment in multiple technologies, all at the same time and on many fronts — by OEMs, for development of power trains; by the government, for development of infrastructure and by fleet owners, who would end up having different power trains in their fleet,” Arya said, adding that this challenge should not be underestimated, and the enormity of it should be taken seriously.

RELIANCE TOPS HURUN'S LIST OF INDIA'S MOST VALUABLE PRIVATE SECTOR COMPANIES

June 21, 2023

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance industries is the most valuable private company in the country, as per Hurun India's 2022 Burgundy Private Hurun India 500 list. The list, which was released on Tuesday, stated that with a value of Rs 16.4 lakh crore, Reliance is India's most valuable company, followed by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) with Rs 11.8 lakh crore, and HDFC Bank with Rs 9.4 lakh crore. Reliance is also the highest taxpayer with a payout of Rs 16,297 crore and the most profitable company with a bottomline of Rs 67,845 crore in 2022-23. The list ranked vaccine maker Serum Institute of India as the most valuable unlisted company in the country with Rs 1.92 lakh crore in value. It overtook National Stock Exchange, which was pushed to the No. 2 spot with Rs 1.65 lakh crore in value. BYJU'S with Rs 69,100 crore value came in at No.3.

The list by Burgundy Private, Axis Bank's Private Banking Business and Hurun India tracks changes in the value of the top 500 Indian companies during the six-month period (from October 30, 2022, to April 30, 2023), it said in a statement. It is a list of the 500 most valuable non-state-owned companies in India, ranked according to their value, defined as market capitalization for listed companies, and valuations for non-listed companies.

"The total value of the top 500 companies in India declined marginally by 6.4% to Rs 212 lakh crore from Rs 227 lakh crore as of October 30, 2022," it said adding the companies on the list underperformed compared to SENSEX and other global indices. The total value of the top 10 companies remains unchanged at Rs 71.5 lakh crore, equivalent to 37% of India's GDP and 31% of the total value of the 2022 Burgundy Private Hurun India 500. By absolute value, the biggest gainers were HDFC Bank, ITC, and Housing Development Finance Corporation. In comparison, eight companies in the Adani Group decreased its value by 52% or Rs 10,25,955 crore after it was hit by a scathing Hindenburg report. The report said the value of Reliance decreased by 5.1%, or Rs 87,731 crore in the last six months. While the total value of TCS increased marginally by 0.7% and HDFC Bank increased by 12.9%.

IndianOil top bidder for Reliance's KG gas for second auction in row

June 13, 2023

IOC, the nation's largest oil firm, has walked away with half of the natural gas that Reliance Industries Ltd and its partner bp of the UK offered in the latest auction of the fuel

Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), the nation's largest oil firm, has walked away with half of the natural gas that Reliance Industries Ltd and its partner bp of the UK offered in the latest auction of the fuel used to generate power, produce fertilizer, turned into CNG and used for cooking purposes.

IOC got 2.5 million standard cubic meters per day out of the 5 mmscmd of gas auctioned last month, sources with knowledge of the matter said.

The oil refining and marketing company, which was the top bidder even in the previous auction of gas from the eastern offshore KG-D6 block of Reliance-bp, bid the volumes on behalf of seven fertilizer plants.

City gas companies including GAIL Gas Ltd, Mahanagar Gas Ltd, Torrent Gas, Indian Oil Adani Gas Ltd, and Haryana City Gas secured a total of 0.5 mmscmd of gas for turning into CNG for sale to automobiles and piped to household kitchens for cooking purposes.

State gas utility GAIL and refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) got 0.6 mmscmd each while Gujarat State Petroleum Corp (GSPC) walked away with 0.5 mmscmd and Shell another 0.2 mmscmd, they said.

Reliance-bp, which two years back reversed the declining trend in domestic gas output by bringing to production their second wave of discoveries in the KG-D6 block lying in deepsea of the Bay of Bengal, are now ramping up supplies.

Natural gas, a cleaner-burning, efficient fuel, is being seen as a transition fuel for nations to move from polluting hydrocarbons to zero-emission fuels.

Reliance-bp in the latest tender offered 5 mmscmd of gas for a period of 3 years starting June 1. Bidders were asked to quote a variable 'v' over and above the JKM price, the spot market benchmark for liquefied natural gas (LNG) delivered to Japan and South Korea.

Sources said the e-auction started on May 19 and ended on May 23 - the longest duration of an auction since the time operators were allowed to sell fuel through open tender.

At the end of the e-auction, gas was sold to 16 buyers at a price of JKM + (plus) USD 0.75 per mmBtu for 3 years, they said adding at the current JKM price of USD 9.2 per mmBtu, the price for KG-D6 gas comes to around USD 10.

This rate compares with the capped price of USD 6.5 per mmBtu that Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), the state-owned behemoth, gas for fuel produced from legacy or old fields.

Reliance-bp had in April sold 6 mmscmd of gas. IOC had walked away with almost half of the 6 mmscmd of gas sold in an e-auction on April 12 while GAIL bought 0.7 mmscmd, Adani-Total Gas Ltd 0.4 mmscmd, Shell 0.5 mmscmd, GSPC 0.25 mmscmd and IGS another 0.5 mmscmd.

In that auction too, the final bid price came at USD 0.75 per mmBtu premium over the JKM price (JKM + USD 0.75 per mmBtu), sources said.

But the bidders will only have to pay the ceiling or the cap price that the government fixes bi-annually for gas produced from difficult areas, such as deepsea and high-temperature, high-pressure (HTHP).

The ceiling price for April to September is USD 12.12 per mmBtu.

Gas produced from wells drilled below the seabed is used to produce electricity, make fertiliser, or turned into CNG for powering automobiles or piped to household kitchens for cooking as well as in industries.

In May last year, Reliance-bp had auctioned 5.5 mmscmd of incremental gas from the newer discoveries in the KG-D6 block, benchmarking it to the same JKM gas marker.

The price discovered in that e-auction came at a USD 0.06 discount to the JKM (Japan-Korea Marker) LNG price.

Prior to that, the duo had sold 7.5 mmscmd of gas at a discount of USD 0.18 per mmBtu to JKM.

Reliance has so far made 19 gas discoveries in the KG-D6 block. Of these, D-1 and D-3 -- the largest among the lot -- were brought into production in April 2009, and MA, the only oilfield in the block, was put into production in September 2008.

While the MA field stopped producing in September 2018, output from D-1 and D-3 ceased in February 2020.

Since then, Reliance-bp is investing USD 5 billion in bringing to production three deepwater gas projects in block KG-D6 -- R-Cluster, Satellites Cluster, and MJ -- which together are expected to meet about 15 per cent of India's gas demand by 2023.

 

Reliance climbs eight spots to 45th rank on Forbes' Global 2000 list

June 13, 2023

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. climbed eight spots to the 45th rank, the highest for an Indian company on Forbes' latest Global 2000 list of public companies worldwide..

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. climbed eight spots to the 45th rank, the highest for an Indian company on Forbes' latest Global 2000 list of public companies worldwide.The Global 2000 ranks the largest companies in the world using four metrics: sales, profits, assets, and market value, Forbes said while releasing the 2023 ranking of the world's top 2,000 companies. JPMorgan, America's biggest bank with $3.7 trillion in assets, is at the top of the list for the first time since 2011 and has emerged stronger from this spring's regional banking crisis, with more deposits and opportunistic acquisition of the failed First Republic Bank, it said.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway which topped the list last year, fell to the 338th position in the latest list due to unrealised losses in its investment portfolio. Saudi oil behemoth Aramco is in 2nd position followed by three giant-sized state-owned Chinese banks. Technology giants Alphabet and Apple are at 7th and 10th place, respectively.

Oil-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance, with sales of $109.43 billion and a profit of $8.3 billion, is the top-most-ranked Indian firm at the 45th spot, climbing from the 53rd position it had held in last year's ranking. Reliance has ranked ahead of well-known names like Germany's BMW Group, Switzerland's Nestle, China's Alibaba Group, US-based Procter & Gamble and Japan's Sony.

State Bank of India climbed to the 77th spot from 105th in the 2022 ranking. HDFC Bank is at 128th position (153 in 2022) and ICICI Bank is at 163 (204 in 2022). Other Indian firms on the list include state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) at 226 and HDFC at 232. Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) made its maiden entry at 363 while Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) slipped to 387th rank from 384 last year.

Axis Bank (423), NTPC (433), Larsen & Toubro (449), Bharti Airtel (478), Kotak Mahindra Bank (502), Indian Oil Corporation (540), Infosys (554), Bank of Baroda (586), Coal India (591), Tata Steel (592), Hindalco (660) and Vedanta (687) are other notable Indian firms on the list. In all, 55 Indian firms figured on the list.

Three firms of the conglomerate helmed by billionaire Gautam Adani, whose group faced a scathing attack from a U.S. short-seller earlier this year that lead to him losing the world's third richest tag, figured in the list. they were: Adani Enterprises at 1062, Adani Power at 1488, and Adani Ports & Special Economic Zones at 1598.

Mcap of seven of top-10 most valued firms rises Rs 1.33 lakh crore; Reliance biggest winner

November 06, 2022

Seven of the top-10 most valued firms together added Rs 1,33,707.42 crore in market valuation last week amid an overall positive trend in equities, with Reliance Industries emerging as the biggest winner. Last week, the BSE benchmark jumped 990.51 points or 1.65 per cent.

The market capitalisation (mcap) of Reliance Industries jumped Rs 44,956.5 crore to Rs 17,53,888.92 crore.

Reliance Industries remained the most valued domestic firm, followed by TCS, HDFC Bank, Infosys, ICICI Bank, Hindustan Unilever, State Bank of India, Bharti Airtel, HDFC and ITC

K V Kamath appointed independent director of RIL, soon-to-be-listed Jio Financial Services

November 04, 2022

Reliance Industries on Friday said that it has appointed K V Kamath as an independent director on its board for a period of five years.

Further, Kamath has also been appointed as an independent director and non-executive Chairman of Reliance Strategic Investments, the entity that will house the financial services business of the conglomerate and be renamed Jio Financial Services.

Kamath, a veteran in the banking industry, is currently the Chairman of the National Bank for Financing Infrastructure and Development (NaBIFD).

Reliance eyes first oil cargo from UAE trade arm in December: Report

December 16, 2021

Reliance Industries Ltd, operator of the world's biggest refining complex at Jamnagar in Western India, aims to get the first cargo of oil from its new Abu Dhabi-based trading unit in December, a source familiar with the matter said 

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani-backed Reliance group in October announced plans to set up Reliance International Ltd (RINL) to trade in crude oil, petroleum, products and agricultural commodities.

The Indian conglomerate aims to get about a 500,000 barrels cargo of United Arab Emirates' Das crude from RINL, said the source, who is not authorised to speak to media

Abu Dhabi chemical company, Reliance Industries form $2 billion production JV

December 08, 2021

Abu Dhabi state-owned Chemicals Derivatives Company (TA'ZIZ) and Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries have agreed to start a more than $2 billion chemical production partnership in Ruwais, Abu Dhabi, TA'ZIZ said in a statement on Tuesday.

The joint venture, called TA'ZIZ EDC & PVC, will construct and operate a chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride (EDC) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) production facility, the statement said.

The JV aims to export the materials to target markets in Southeast Asia and Africa as well as selling them domestically.

Representing the first production of these chemicals in the UAE, the project will enable the substitution of imports and the creation of new local value chains, while also meeting growing demand for these chemicals globally," TA'ZIZ said.

TA'ZIZ was formed last year, also as a joint venture, by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Abu Dhabi state-owned holding company ADQ, which own 60% and 40% respectively.

"India's need for PVC to propel its growth, and the value from the abundantly available feedstock in UAE, provides a win-win partnership for both companies," TA'ZIZ quoted Reliance's billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani as saying.

TA'ZIZ said in November last year it had chosen potential investment projects worth over $5 billion in the planned Ruwais Derivatives Park, for the development of which the JV is meant to act as a catalyst.

The project is Reliance's first investment in the MENA region, TA'ZIZ said

Ambani’s Reliance Ends Decade-Long Shale Venture With Asset Sale

November 09, 2021

Reliance Industries Ltd., the oil refining and petrochemicals giant controlled by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, is ending it’s decade-long venture into North American shale gas with a sale of assets to a company backed by private-equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC. Ensign Natural Resources LLC agreed to buy drilling rights across 62,000 net acres in the Eagle Ford Shale region of South Texas for an undisclosed price Reliance, according to a statement on Monday.  “With this transaction, Reliance has divested all its shale gas assets and has exited from the shale gas business in North America,” the company said in a separate to the statement. The sale is at “a consideration higher than current carrying value of the assets

RIL to double PET recycling capacity

August 04, 2021

Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) said it is doubling its PET recycling capacity by setting up a recycled polyester staple fibre (PSF) manufacturing facility in Andhra Pradesh through an arrangement with a local entrepreneur.

“The move is part of RIL’s commitment to lead the industry on circular economy, enhance its sustainability quotient and bolster the entire polyester and polymer value chain,” it said in a statement.

As a part of this plan, Srichakra Ecotex India Pvt. Ltd. will build and operate exclusively for RIL the new recycled PSF – Recron GreenGold and PET flakes wash-line in Andhra Pradesh.

RIL’s initiative to more than double its recycling capacity to 5 billion post-consumer PET bottles will ensure India maintains over 90% recycling rate, the company said. Vipul Shah, COO, Petrochemicals Business, RIL, said, “The expansion of PET Recycling capacity is part of Mr Mukesh Ambani’s vision to transform our legacy business into sustainable, circular and net zero carbon materials business and support the entrepreneurs to take risk throughout the value chain.”

Srinivas Mikkilineni, director, Srichakra Ecotex Pvt. Ltd., said, “The agreement with RIL provides an excellent opportunity for us to expand our footprint into the recycled polyester staple fibre market.”