London, October 27 (IANS). Indian billionaire Prashant Ruia is building a new hydrogen fuel-based refinery on the banks of the River Mersey in Britain, which would be the country’s first emission-free plant.
According to a profile news in the Sunday Times Business, a view of fields and smoke-spewing chemical plants spreads before us as seen from the roof of a building in the industrial center of Britain’s northwest region. One horizon is formed by the Welsh hills and the other by the River Mersey and Cammel Laird Shipyards.
A glorious day in Cheshire and Indian billionaire Prashant Ruia is in the mood like autumn sunshine. Placing a hand on my shoulder, he points to the haphazard expanse of steaming pipes, blazing chimneys and giant cooling towers that together form Stanlow, Britain’s second largest oil refinery.
He dramatically spread his arms and smiled as he said, “This is all changing. We’re going to decarbonize industry across the entire Northwest.”
Ruia, 55, is a scion of the family industrial house Essar Group, and is its chief executive. Founded by his father Shashi and uncle Ravi, known as the “Ruia Brothers”, the checkered fortunes of the group are part of business legend.
They purchased the Stanlow refinery from Shell in 2011 when it was undergoing renovations and was in poor condition. Ruia says he has since invested a billion dollars in it, but it is still clear that the 100-year-old plant, which produces 16 percent of Britain’s fuel, has seen better days. Pipes leak in many places, while its distillation columns that convert crude oil into jet fuel, diesel and gasoline are generally rusty and discolored. Large parts of it are closed and rusting.
However, look closer and you can see the future, and Ruia’s excitement about it. In the distance a brand new refinery emerges from among a network of scaffolding, its gleaming silver towers in sharp contrast to the deep red rust of a disused 1960s structure standing in the background.
It is being made to run on hydrogen. It will be the first refinery in the UK not to be based on CO2-emitting gas.
“And, this is just the beginning,” says Ruia. If all goes to plan and the government gives its support, the family will adopt carbon-capture technology to other parts of the refinery, pumping the carbon into untapped gas fields beneath the seabed of Liverpool Bay.
However, first Essar needs to build a plant to produce hydrogen. Ruia says it will have “350 MW” of generation capacity. He has a number in his mind for every subject matter. If everything goes well, a second hydrogen plant will also be built. The gas left after the refinery is used will be piped to neighboring factories, such as the Enserk bottling plant, to decarbonize their operations as well.
In short, Ruia and Essar’s Energy Transition Entity (EET) in the North-West are important private sector enablers under the government’s GB Energy plan to provide clean energy by 2030. In fact, just a few weeks ago, a team from Downing Street came to town and Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced £21.7bn of government funding for these projects and a similar “cluster” in Humberside.
Ruia says, “These are major projects of this size in the world. There is no other country today which has such a clear policy on this subject and is moving forward so fast. I don’t think the steps that Britain has taken would be He gets enough credit.”
Ruia is so charming and so inspiring that it is difficult not to be impressed by him. Had my grandmother been there, she would have said that he could even attract the birds sitting on the trees.
Dressed in his company’s branded fleece, chinos and desert boots, you could easily forget he’s a billionaire with a lavish hotel-sized Mayfair mansion. Maybe that’s because he has been hanging out with site managers and workers at the family’s construction sites, ports and factories since he was 11 years old.
He said he started working full-time in the business when he was 16, and by 17 he was running his first project: the construction of a three-km-long rail bridge in the suburbs of Mumbai. “They don’t wait for you to grow up before giving you responsibility. You find yourself in deep water,” he explains.
A 17-year-old running a major public infrastructure project? Really? He said, “Sure, we had experienced people there, but I was basically the project manager the whole time. We were on site day and night for two years.”
He said, “So, yes, we made it, and, we suffered a loss.”
In fact, a lot of money: about $250,000. But instead of yelling at him, his father seemed happy: “He said, ‘This is the best loss of my life, considering what you’ve learned. When you can manage something despite the loss, that’s when you really Are you able to understand how to manage it? “And they were right. I was making every possible effort, fighting for every penny.”
Ruia is among a number of crazy-rich Indians who made their fortunes after India’s highly controlled “License Raj” economy was liberalized in the early 1990s.
“I saw change happening. After the market opened, we moved forward as a family. We were its direct beneficiaries,” says Ruia.
Before this, he had a fairly ordinary, middle-class childhood. The family lived in Chennai, formerly known as Madras, on the east coast of India, where “there were no good facilities at that time. We used to spend hours after school on the cricket pitch. It was a small place, so all the friends lived nearby.”
His father and uncle had six sisters, and they all lived in the same house. This was a habit he could never give up. The home is now in Mumbai, on the west coast, where all the Ruias – brother, sister, aunt, uncle, nephew – still live in the same house.
That being said, this is no ordinary house. A former colleague who has been there describes it as “huge”. “Everyone has an entire floor each.” Ruia gives a sarcastic smile: “We have a little space in the house.”
And then, of course, there are Ruia’s other huge homes in Mumbai, Delhi and London, including a recently purchased £113 million home in Regent’s Park. They are clearly not in competition with each other.
The Stanlow hydrogen project has brought some positive headlines to Ruia – a welcome change from the norm a few years ago. The site was almost shut down during Covid, when demand for its fuel fell due to the lockdown as operations of its 40 airline customers were closed and only a small number of car owners were buying its petrol.
It then emerged that despite taking millions of pounds from the business in dividends over the years, Essar was given access to the Covid support scheme, giving it extra grace to pay its £356 million VAT bill. Furthermore, it was also revealed that its auditor, Deloitte, had resigned, complaining about “control and governance” at the group. It was viewed negatively by all newspapers including the Sunday Times Business.
When we came down from the terrace and sat in a meeting room, and I talked about this, Ruia’s smile disappeared for the first time: “We were disappointed by the media’s approach to them. I don’t think they had All the facts were there. I don’t think they understood that all the (refineries) were making huge losses, yet we kept all our employees on the job, paid everyone during that period, Even though we were suffering heavy losses.”
It was not just the media that was taking a biased view, although I have spoken about it. The approach of Deloitte, one of the world’s largest auditing firms, was reprehensible. And Magic Circle law firm Freshfields also resigned.
He said, “We have answered all these questions many times. This was a period when things were not clear.” He declined to comment further. Essar later issued a statement saying that “there were some fundamental differences of opinion among some of our advisors regarding the long-term sustainability of our business in view of the pandemic. These questions are addressed later.”
In fact, the VAT bill was paid in full, and the business is back on track.
Essar Energy, which includes Stanlow and Indian assets including ports, refineries and even gas fracking operations, made a profit of $373 million last year, according to internal calculations, on sales of $12.2 billion. .
Ruia has gone through difficult times before also. In the 1990s, his Essar Steel arm defaulted on repayment of a foreign currency loan of $250 million – the first humiliating case for India.
He sold off large parts of his empire, from mobile phone operations to steel mills, to pay off his debts – this is called “deleveraging” in financial parlance.
The figures show how large the Ruiya Empire was. Vodafone bought the family’s 33 percent stake in their Indian joint venture for five billion dollars, and that was just a settlement. “We reduced our balance sheet by more than $20 billion,” says Ruia. Was it emotional? Was it difficult? Obviously, when you create something and then you have to sell it for money, it’s It is difficult.”
However, he has been an optimist by nature (a former colleague says, “If you could bottle his optimism, you too would be a billionaire.”) and he concludes: “Looking back, it This gives us the opportunity to start investing more heavily now in this energy transition. “This gives us a new opportunity to move forward and make this investment.”
Essar Energy makes most of its money from Britain, but the London stock market is not expected to boom in the near future. Ruia listed it on the London Stock Exchange in 2010, raising £1.2 billion and valuing the business at £5.4 billion. Stocks fell as the Indian economy slowed down. The shares, which had reached £420 in just four years, were bought by Ruia at a price of only £70 per share amid opposition from small shareholders.
“They will not be welcomed back,” says a City investor.
Now, however, Ruia clearly wants to be seen as a force for good in Britain, helping to decarbonise the industrial North West.
I wondered whether his 81-year-old father and 75-year-old uncle, who made billions in the polluting steel and energy industries for decades, would have approved of Ruia’s big green bet.
Ruia has no doubts: “It may have taken them a little longer to understand it, but now they understand it 200 percent. Not just 100 percent. Now it’s a reality, not just an idea. It’s really happening.” Is.”
–IANS
AKJ/ABM
