India's Largest Refinery to Undergo Routine Maintenance Shutdown; Government Assures No Impact on Fuel Availability

India’s largest domestic market-oriented refinery—Reliance Industries (RIL) domestic tariff area refinery at Jamnagar—will be taking a routine maintenance shutdown later this month, but the government doesn’t expect the shutdown to impact fuel availability in the country, particularly that of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a senior Petroleum Ministry official said on Wednesday. The government is also involved in coordinating refinery shutdowns by different refiners to ensure ample fuel availability amid the West Asia crisis, which has reduced energy flows to India. RIL 33-million-tonnes-per-annum (mtpa) refinery is the largest refinery supplying fuels for the Indian market. The company’s Jamnagar refinery complex also has a 35.2-mtpa special economic zone (SEZ) refinery that is export-oriented. Refineries take periodic planned maintenance shutdowns, or turnarounds, to ensure operational safety, comply with regulations, and replace equipment that needs to be changed. These scheduled refinery outages help with inspection, cleaning, repairs, and upgrades to maintain and even improve operational efficiency. Due to the West Asia war, wherever feasible, refinery shutdowns have been postponed to ensure stable and adequate fuel supplies in India. According to Petroleum Ministry Joint Secretary Sujata Sharma, RIL’s refinery shutdown—likely to last about four weeks—will begin after Nayara Energy’s 20-mtpa Vadinar refinery comes back on stream after its maintenance turnaround is completed by the middle of May. The Vadinar refinery’s maintenance shutdown started last month after facing months-long delays. “Shutdowns or turnarounds are part of normal operations as far as refineries are concerned. We in the ministry try to ensure that all shutdowns don’t happen at the same time. It has to be scattered so that the supplies for the domestic market are not affected, and that’s what we are ensuring now also. Right now the Nayara refinery is under shutdown, and by the mid of this month or even before that, it will come back (on stream). And then the Reliance shutdown will start,” Sharma said. She added that the shutdown will not have any impact on the domestic production of LPG as not all units of the RIL refinery are going to be offline. As for other fuels like petrol, diesel, and aviation turbine fuel, the country is self-sufficient and a net exporter, which means that there is no real supply constraint. While the West Asia war and the consequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz has impacted India’s energy imports, LPG supplies are the worst affected due to the country’s heavy reliance on the cooking fuel’s imports from large West Asian suppliers. India depends on imports to meet about 60% of its LPG consumption, and a whopping 90% of those imports came via the Strait of Hormuz. This means that the Strait of Hormuz effectively saw the movement of around 54% of India’s LPG consumption. In the case of LNG imports, on which India depends to meet half of its natural gas requirement, the Strait accounted for 55-60% of the supplies. As for crude oil, about 40% came through the shipping corridor. The disruption has forced India to ration LPG supplies to industrial and commercial consumers in a bid to prioritise crores of households that depend on the fuel to run their kitchens. There are over 33 crore households in India with LPG connections. As a demand management tool, the minimum gap between LPG refill bookings by households has also been increased. Moreover, domestic refineries have been maximising domestic LPG production to partly offset the loss in imports, and refiners are scrambling for LPG cargoes from alternative geographies like the US, Australia, and Russia, among others. Through diplomatic efforts, India has also managed to get nine of its LPG tankers stuck in the Persian Gulf. Efforts by refiners to maximise domestic LPG output have led to an increase of about 40% in India’s LPG production vis-à-vis pre-West Asia conflict levels, which means that the country’s own LPG production is now meeting roughly 55% of the demand versus 40% earlier. Sharma assured that the domestic LPG production is expected to remain high despite one of the largest refineries in the country shutting down for maintenance. She also said that no supply tightness is expected in other major fuels—petrol, diesel, and aviation turbine fuel—as India is a net exporter. Moreover, The government has also imposed export duties on diesel and aviation turbine fuel to disincentivise exports in order to keep the domestic market well-supplied. India is the world’s third-largest consumer of crude oil and the fourth-largest refiner, with a bulk of the petroleum fuels—like petrol and diesel—and petroleum products consumed within the country, and some volumes exported. India has a refining capacity of roughly 260 mtpa, which usually operate at over 100% of their nameplate capacity. Indian refineries cumulatively produced over 280 million tonnes of fuels and other petroleum products in 2025-26 (FY26); the country’s domestic consumption was about 240 million tonnes, according to data from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC) of the Petroleum Ministry.