What it does
Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, universally known as HPCL, is an Indian public sector petroleum company headquartered in Mumbai and administered by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. It is a subsidiary of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, which has held a majority stake since January 2018, and it sits on the downstream side of the oil business: it buys crude, refines it, and sells the products to households, drivers, airlines and industry.[1]
The company wholly owns two large refineries, one on the west coast at Mumbai and one on the east coast at Visakhapatnam, and between them they give it a refining capacity of about 23.2 million tonnes a year. It holds equity in three more refining ventures, at Mangalore, at Bathinda in Punjab and at Barmer in Rajasthan, which effectively multiplies its refining footprint several times over without it owning those plants outright.[1]
Marketing is the part of the company the public meets. HPCL sells petrol and diesel through its retail pumps across the country, sells cooking gas in cylinders under the HP Gas brand, supplies aviation turbine fuel at major airports, sells lubricants under names such as Laal Ghoda and HP Milcy, and moves bulk fuel, bitumen and solvents to industry through its terminals and depots. Its lubricants business is the market leader in India, with more than a third of the market.[1]
Below that sits a physical network that is easy to underestimate: 19 zonal offices and 145 regional offices, terminals, aviation service facilities, LPG bottling plants and distributors, lube filling plants, inland relay depots and retail outlets. The company also runs an LPG storage cavern at Visakhapatnam, the largest lubricant refinery in the country, and a green research and development centre in Bangalore.[1]
The through line in all of it is that HPCL is a state company whose parent is also a state company. ONGC produces crude, HPCL refines and sells it, and both answer to the same ministry, which is why the two are usually discussed together as an attempt at vertical integration within the public sector rather than as an ordinary parent and subsidiary.[1][2]
