Biography | Mukesh Ambani — The Motikhavdi Refinery That Made India an Exporter

The world's largest single-site oil refinery sits on former waste ground at Motikhavdi, west of Jamnagar on the Gulf of Kutch.

Reliance commemorates 28 December 1999 as the day the first Jamnagar refinery was launched. That date is also Dhirubhai Ambani's birthday. Wikipedia lists an earlier commissioning date of 14 July 1999. The company's own later accounts, and the 25-year coverage in LiveMint, Ahmedabad Mirror and Chemical Weekly, treat 28 December as the public milestone.

Mukesh Ambani had already run Patalganga. Jamnagar was the next scale jump: a grassroots refinery of about 27 million tonnes a year, built in roughly 33 months with Bechtel, UOP and Foster Wheeler on the engineering side, on land the company still describes as barren when the job began.

RIL's chairman page credits him with driving the project and then adding a second, export-oriented unit beside it, commissioned in December 2008. Combined capacity at the site later reached about 1.24 to 1.4 million barrels a day, depending on which company figure you take.

The effect inside India was immediate. Company data cited in the 25-year coverage says gasoline and diesel imports, more than 10 million tonnes in 1998-99, fell to zero once the unit was running. India became a product exporter from a plot that had not refined a barrel five years earlier.

The complex is not a public tour. The pin is the Motikhavdi site itself. What a visitor sees from the highway is pipe racks, flares and a township. The decision that matters happened when Mukesh treated a Gujarati salt flat as a place to put a world-scale plant rather than a coastal tank farm.

Dhirubhai died on 6 July 2002. The refinery was already on stream. The argument over who would own what came later. The metal on this ground was already his son's work.

Photo: Mukesh Ambani, Prime Minister's Office, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons