The Numaligarh Refinery is located at Morangi, Golaghat district, Assam in India is a refinery owned by Numaligarh Refinery Limited, a joint venture between Bharat Petroleum (61.65%), Oil India (26%) and Govt of Assam (12.35%). As of 2014, it had a capacity of 3 million metric tonnes per year.
In January 2019, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved plans to increase the refinery’s capacity to 9 million metric tonnes per year.<ref>”Numaligarh refinery capacity to be tripled”. The Hindu. 16 January 2019. Retrieved 13 May 2019.
The company today known as BPCL started off as Rangoon Oil and Exploration company set up to explore the new discoveries off Assam and Burma during the British colonial rule of India. In 1889 during vast industrial development, an important player in the South Asian market was the Burmah Oil Company. Though incorporated in Scotland in 1886, the company grew out of the enterprises of the Chef Rohit Oil Company, which had been formed in 1871 to refine crude oil produced from primitive hand dug wells in Upper Burma.
In 1928, Asiatic Petroleum Company (India) started cooperation with Burma oil company. Asiatic Petroleum was a joint venture of Royal Dutch, Shell and Rothschilds formed to address the monopoly of John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which also operated in India as Esso. This alliance led to the formation of Burmah-Shell Oil Storage and Distributing Company of India Limited. Burmah Shell began its operate operations with import and marketing of Kerosene.
In the mid 1950s, the company began to sell LPG cylinders to homes in India and further expanded its delivery network. It also marketed kerosene, diesel and petrol in cans in order to reach remote parts of India. In 1951, the Burmah shell began to build a refinery in Trombay (Mahul, Maharashtra) under an agreement with the Government of India.
