NEW DELHI, May 13 (Reuters) - India Gas Solutions, a jointventure of Reliance Industries Ltd and BP,U.S.-based Excelerate Energy and Japan's Mitsui and Co Ltd have bid to build a gas import facility on India's westcoast, a company official said.
A consortium of Norway's Hoegh LNG and IMCinfrastructure has also participated in the initial tender, saidR. M. Parmar, chairman of Mumbai Port Trust.
Energy-hungry India is building liquefied natural gas (LNG)terminals at various locations to boost the use of the fuel tocut carbon emissions and improve air quality.
Nearly a quarter of a century after India's economicliberalisation, many businesses still rely on costly backupgenerators for round-the-clock power and one third of its 1.2billion people are still not connected to the grid.
Currently, India has four LNG terminals with combined annualcapacity of 20 million tonnes on the country's west coast.
A 5 million tonne-a-year floating storage andre-gasification unit (FSRU) at the Mumbai port along with otherinfrastructure such as pipelines would coast about 30 billionrupees ($470 million), Parmar told Reuters.
He said the Mumbai Port Trust, which is the facilitator forthe project and will charge a fee from the company building andoperating the FSRU, plans to award the contract for constructionof the terminal by the end of this year.
The Mumbai port LNG project is expected to be completed byearly 2018, he said.
Reliance and BP in 2011 established India Gas Solutionsthrough an equal partnership to source, market and transportnatural gas in Asia's third-largest economy.
($1 = 63.8932 Indian rupees) (Reporting by Nidhi Verma, editing by David Evans)