Pet Coke: MRPL marginally reduces prices for Dec’20

Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL), a Category 1 schedule ‘A’ Miniratna, Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) under the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, has decreased its petroleum coke prices w.e.f. 1^st Dec’20.

The revised price for road supply is INR 8,200/t, a decrease of INR 50/t as against INR 8,250/t in the last month.

Similarly, MRPL has also decreased its pet coke price by INR 50/t for supply by rake/barge to INR 7,900/t from INR 7,950/t of last month.

Price Commentaries

Notably, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has increased petroleum coke price with effect from 1st Dec’20 to INR 9,135/t ex-Jamnagar refinery in Gujarat, over its last month’s price of INR 8,851/t — a moderate increase of INR 284/t.

In fact, there have been continuous price upticks of pet coke in every month starting from June this year, when the price was INR 5,697/MT, resulting into an increase of INR 3,438/t or 60% in the past 6 months.

Contrarily, MRPL has reduced its prices by INR 50/t in Dec’20 against increase of INR 284/t by RIL. Further, MRPL price in Jun’20 was INR 6,490/t and it has increased only by INR 1,719/t since then. Thus, the increase is quite less at 26.3% as compared to 60% by RIL during Jun’20 to Dec’20. This clearly shows that the price movements at these two refineries are quite different due to different marketing conditions prevailing at these refineries.

MRPL has maintained a price difference of INR 300/t between its road supplies and rake/barge supplies, which is the approximate expenditure incurred by a customer for shifting the material from refinery to rake/barge loading area.

Month-wise pet coke prices from Dec’19 to Dec’20 for MRPL and RIL are represented graphically as follows:

From the above chart, it may be observed that in the month of Dec’20, the price gap between MRPL and RIL has increased and MRPL price is now lower by INR 935/t than RIL, which was previously lower by INR 601/t in Nov’20.

The variations between MRPL and RIL prices during the above period has been ranging from (-) INR 935/t in Dec’20 to (+) INR 793/t in Jun’20. MRPL price has been lower in most of the months and on overall average basis, it is lower than RIL by approximately INR 476/t.