Design and Site Support Services for underground caverns, India

In India, GC GROUP created the detailed design and provided site services for the construction of two underground unlined rock caverns for the storage of crude oil: One cavern with a capacity of 1.33 MMT crude oil at Vishakhapatnam and another one with 1.25 MMT crude oil at Padur.

Project details

The Government of India (GoI) decided to extend the crude oil storage capacities in the country, to ensure the secured supply of petroleum products within the country, as well as for the region of South-East Asia. Also, the safe and strategic storage should provide the amount of petroleum which is required to sustain 35 to 40 days of refinery operations. Therefore, The GoI ordered three crude oil reserves of overall 5.33 MMT storage capacity.

Indian Strategic Petroleum Storage Reserves Limited (ISPRL) took on the project management; Engineers India Limited (EIL) acted as a project management consultant (PMC), responsible for investigations and the basic design.

Our contribution

As the underground rock caverns were the first-ever build in India, GC GROUP was hired as an expert in this field to provide the detailed design and site support for the construction. For both locations, we conducted a site characterization and established an overall geological/geotechnical framework which the design was based on. During the excavations, we supported the constructor with several services, including detailed documentation of construction conditions and periodic updates for the rock support design.

Services in a nutshell

• geological and/or geotechnical site investigations
• stability assessment
• temporary rock support design
• excavation and related works
• permanent rock supports re-design according to the observational approach.