NOIDA: A 34km pipeline, buried a metre below the ground, will directly transport 1.5 million metric tonnes of aviation turbine fuel (ATF) annually from a fuel terminal in Faridabad's Piyala to the Noida International Airport in Jewar.
Officials said on Thursday that 90% of the pipeline work has been completed and the remaining is likely to be finished by Feb end.
The project began after Bharat Petroleum (BPCL) reached an agreement with NIA early 2024 to set up a captive ATF pipeline.
A captive pipeline is one that originates from a fuel refinery or terminal and only supplies to a particular consumer.
Additional district magistrate (judicial) and the project's competent authority Bhair Pal Singh said 3.6km of the pipeline crosses through Gautam Budh Nagar and the rest lies in Haryana.
Within the district, it crosses land parcels belonging to 132 farmers in Jewar's Dayanatpur and Karoli Bangar villages.
"Over nine months last year, the district administration tracked down all the landowners, some of whom had migrated to other places. Talks were held with them to gain their permission to lay down the pipeline. Farmers were compensated at 10% of the area's circle rate for granting land-use permissions. Importantly, the land remains available for farming as well as the pipeline is at a depth of one metre," Singh said.
Announced last year, direct supply of aviation fuel to the airport makes it cost-effective and is expected to reduce carbon emissions by doing away with the need to transport it via road or rail.
"We are confident that this move will reduce carbon emissions and boost our overall efficiency, contributing to a more sustainable future, which is the need of the hour," Kiran Jain, NIA's chief operating officer, said in an earlier statement.
Singh said the pipeline's capacity will be scaled up as in when demand increases.
This is not the first time ATF pipelines are being used, though they still aren't common practice.
BPCL says on its website that it laid its first captive ATF pipeline of 15km from a Mumbai refinery to the Santacruz airport in 2013. Another captive ATF pipeline of 34km was laid in Kerala's Kochi the same year to get ATF directly to the airport there.
Indian Oil also operates multiple ATF pipelines across cities, including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Lucknow and Kolkata.
The Noida International Airport, slated to become one of Asia's largest, is in the advanced stages of its first phase of development. First commercial operations from the airport are expected to start later this year.
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