Oxygen Inc battles huge odds as India gasps for air

India’s oxygen makers as well as steel and gas companies are battling time and logistical constraints to link oxygen-surplus locations to deficit areas.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met India’s top oxygen producers and urged them to increase supply and divert tankers meant for other gases to store and ferry oxygen.

Till 2019, India’s oxygen requirement was 700 tonnes per day. The first wave of Covid-19 infections pushed that demand up four times. The recent, deadlier, second wave has pushed it to 5,500 tonnes of oxygen a day.


In the past few days, almost every major hospital in Mumbai and New Delhi — the two cities worst affected by the pandemic — as well as Gujarat, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, have faced acute shortage of oxygen.

India’s oxygen makers have upped production. Petroleum and steel makers are diverting oxygen meant for captive use to hospitals, while companies import tankers.

But the logistical gap is wide, said executives at oxygen producers. Consider this: A tanker can usually hold 15 tonnes of oxygen. Filling a tanker takes 3 hours and transferring it to storage units at hospitals takes another 3 hours.

Fraction of Medical Needs
In a day, a maximum of eight tankers can be filled from one plant. Transportation takes another 24-36 hours. If all air producers pooled resources and worked round-the-clock, it would still fill only a fraction of the vast medical requirement, said a senior executive at one of India’s largest oxygen producers.

Moreover, India has a total of 2,300 such tankers, according to data from the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization, whereas the current requirement has shot up to 5 times that number.

Inox Air Products, one of the country’s largest producers, has 550 tankers. It is now producing 2,400 tonnes of oxygen daily. Cryogenic tankers are placed on empty truck chassis and transported.

Tanker shortage is also showing up everywhere. Steelmaker AM/NS produces 210 tonnes of oxygen in Gujarat but doesn’t have enough tankers to supply hospitals. It is in talks with the government and some tanker and cylinder manufacturers to supply more tankers for sending oxygen to Mumbai and New Delhi.

The problem is also of management and monitoring, said RS Sachdeva, managing director, Hi Tech Industrial Gases. “Capacity of a tanker is up to 20 tonnes of oxygen, but some fill it up with just 6-10 tonnes. This is the issue we are facing right now,” he said. “From our company alone, we have supplied around 4,000 cylinders to top steelmakers and traders of industrial gases. They are all lying idle. They haven’t been returned. They can give those for medical use now and collect them later. That can mean some buffer with hospitals,” he added.

Sorting Logistics
Transporters told ET that trucks are now running 24 hours, with two drivers and mechanics on standby. A number of tankers are being airlifted and flown to places with a shortage. Seven tankers, carrying a total of 105 metric tonnes of oxygen, are coming from Visakhapatnam to Mumbai by a special train service called the Oxygen Express.

Other companies are also acting fast. German air supplier Linde, with the Tata group, has secured 24 oxygen transport tanks that will be airlifted to India.

The Armed Forces Medical Services (AFMS) has decided to import oxygen generation plants and containers from Germany, said a government statement. A total of 23 mobile oxygen generation plants are being airlifted from Germany for AFMS hospitals catering to Covid-19 patients. Each plant can produce 40 litres of oxygen per minute and 2,400 litres an hour. At this rate, it can cater to 20-25 patients round-the-clock, the statement said.

Tata Steel is currently supplying 300 tonnes of oxygen from its plant in Jamshedpur and plans to increase this in the coming days. Executives along the supply chain said the situation will remain critical over the next few days.