OREANDA-NEWS. February 25, 2011. India's second-largest state-run refiner Bharat Petroleum Corp (BPCL) has bought 3 million barrels of West African crude via tender for April loading, a trade source said on Thursday.

BPCL has bought a very large crude carrier containing a million barrels each of Angola's Nemba and Nigeria's Qua Iboe grades from BP for its Kochi refinery, the source said.

It paid a premium of about 27 cents per barrel to Dated Brent for Nemba and a premium of about 3.22 a barrel for Qua Iboe, the source said. It also bought 1 million barrels of Nigerian Brass River oil from ENI at a premium of about USD 3.20 a barrel for its Mumbai plant, the source said.

In its previous tender, BPCL bought 1 million barrels of Nigerian Qua Iboe oil from Morgan Stanley for February loading and skipped the tender for March. BPCL operates a 240,000-bpd refinery in Mumbai as well as a 190,000-bpd refinery in the southern Indian state of Kerala, run by subsidiary Kochi Refineries Ltd. It also owns a majority stake in a 60,000 bpd refinery in northeast India.