SPA News Autumn 2012 - Shell UK

FEATURE ARTIcLE
Ah! bOmbAy
Colin Morsley recalls life in India in the early 1970s, including ingenious in-house
recycling, 36-hour shifts and three-day biryanis …
Taj Mahal
I had been working at the Stanlow
Refinery for nearly three years, since
graduation, when in 1972 I was offered
a two-year assignment to Burmah-Shell
Refineries in Bombay. My mother was
born in Calcutta (as it then was) and had
lived briefly in Bombay in the late 1920s,
so there was a tenuous family connection.
As Burmah-Shell in India was almost fully
‘Indianised’ it wouldn’t be the usual
‘expat experience’ and, professionally,
would be quite a challenge, I thought.
The Burmah-Shell Oil Storage and
Distribution Company had been
operating in India since before World
War I. After the Second World War and
Indian independence, the need for India
to have its own refining capacity was
recognised and several major oil
companies signed refining agreements
with the Indian government.
Burmah-Shell Refineries was set up as a
rupee subsidiary, and then started
operations in 1955 in Trombay, about
15 miles from the centre of Bombay, and
next door to an Esso plant. It was one
of a series of similar refineries built by
Shell during that period, and the
company had a long-term crude supply
agreement to provide light Iranian crude
to the refinery.
By the time I arrived as a young engineer
18 | SPA NEWS
in September 1972, I was the only expat
in the refinery apart from the MD. Many
of my Indian colleagues had been
recruited before start-up and had trained
in the UK and Dutch refineries. Not
‘we began to appreciate
the huge diversity of
Indian culture and cuisine’
surprisingly, Shell had recruited some of
the best engineers from across the
diverse Indian nation and they developed
considerable knowledge of the plant and
its operating history. Most of the refinery
equipment was, naturally, British, Dutch
or US in origin; however, among other
Bombay street
achievements, the refinery had been
ingeniously ‘debottlenecked’ and a
bottling system for domestic gas was
designed and built locally.
By 1972 the business was being severely
challenged by a pincer movement of
rising crude prices (a harbinger of the
first oil shock) and the negative attitude
of the government (led by Mrs Indira
Ghandi) to foreign-owned businesses.
The government took the view that it was
paying too much for crude, and limited
the amount of foreign exchange
proportionately. Thus we processed
progressively less crude as the months
went by, operating well below capacity.
There was also a rigid licensing system
for importing spare parts, which was
partly counteracted by an impressive
‘indigenous development’ programme
of locally-manufactured spares, which
used in-house engineering expertise to
coach local suppliers. All sorts of
techniques were used to recover and
reuse parts as much as possible, and as
I was working in refinery maintenance,
this made life extremely interesting.
Having negotiated an inter-government
deal with Iran for crude (at a higher price
than Shell was paying!), the Indian
government subsequently found that the
state-owned Indianoil refineries, largely
based on Russian technology, were
unable to cope and so asked Burmah-
Shell and the other foreign companies
to process some of their crude. This
meant a switch from barely ticking over
to running flat-out for extended periods