Pet Coke: IndianOil concludes e-auctions from various refineries

Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOC) has conducted online auctions of RPC (Raw Petroleum Coke) from its various refineries on 5th Nov’20 for intrastate consumers.

Results of the auctions are enumerated as follows:

Delivery period for the within-state e-auctions will be for 45 days. Accordingly, intrastate dispatches has commenced from 6^th Nov’20 till 20^th Dec’20.

The current round of e-auctions received overwhelming responses with entire quantities sold out at both the refineries at the respective reserve prices.

As no quantity was left over in this intrastate auction, no auction has been announced for Outside-State consumers.

The reserve prices in these auctions were increased steeply as compared to last auction, which is shown as below:

Contrastingly, in the previous round of intrastate auction conducted on 20th Oct’20, not a single bid was received and the entire offered quantity remained unsold. The market participants cited the reason for non-participation as high reserve price at INR 17,140/t.

Nevertheless, the responses from outside state consumers were quite opposite and apart from the entire quantity being sold, these consumers also increased their bids by over INR 1,000/t to get their quantity allocated. Possibly, this is the first time such situation has arisen, where no quantity was sold in intrastate auction but the entire quantity was sold out in outside state auction at premium.

The above response is being attributed to increase of RPC price in the international market coupled with its tight availability. This is mainly due to lower production of RPC by the refineries amid the present pandemic, which has reduced the demand of other fuels leading to lower capacity utilizations of refineries.