Class Trip to Jamnagar

It was an exciting trip to take, one of 4 trips in that month. A class trip is always incredible fun, and this one is no exception. Not only did we have a great time, I learnt a lot. This class is relatively new to me, but I enjoyed myself to the fullest with this great group. We were visiting Jamnagar, Gujarat, the biggest refinery in the world created and operated by Reliance Industries Limited.

As all class trips go with 9A, we have a certain criteria we must meet for it to be successful. They are:

• Losing ones boarding pass right before getting on the plane.
• Getting scream at by an air hostess for doing something incredibly stupid
• Losing a bag at the destination airport and therefore initiating the long process of its retrieval
• Some people not getting on the bus on time, resulting in the retrieval of these students and the immense yelling of the teachers.

Just a normal, run of the mill case.

Jamnagar Airport was tiny and crammed, with just one Air India flight ferrying passengers from Mumbai. The parking lot was filled with white Reliance cars. We were welcomed by a guide and our security-in-charge, who helped us load our bags into the bus. It was just a 15-minute drive to the Reliance township. Jamnagar was a barren land in the middle of nowhere, but 20 years ago it was transformed into a hub in Gujarat. Roads were made, people were given jobs of construction and highways began to connect Jamnagar to the world.

Reliance Greens is a guest house part of the township, and after picking roommates and being allotted our rooms we made a beeline for the lunch room. After raiding the minifridge of all the drinks in the world, and after being scolded for the same, we sat down to some good food and traditional picking one of the group to make fun of. The lunch was followed by time for rest, unpacking and throwing friends socks out the window. By the way, don’t do that when you have security showing the teacher’s their rooms.

We went for a township visit, where we saw the different parts of the quaint little city by itself. The area was divided into phases (3) and sectors (26). It had a cricket field, a sports complex, a recreation center, a supermarket, a movie theater and arcade. There was a primary and middle school, and the houses were big as well.

The most exciting part of the day was the DHA Sports Complex, and area with amenities like a huge football field, a basketball and tennis court, a badminton court as well as table tennis. We played football for more than 2 hours and even played against some local boys. We returned to our rooms with aches and pains and the occasional falling.

We started the next day with a visit to the learning center, where we saw a presentation of the super refinery. We saw videos of its making, its inauguration, its current use and maintenance and the township built around it. It was built in Jamnagar because of its proximity to the sea and the fact that the barren land present could be utilized for this process, subsequently saving productive land for urbanization. We saw how the crude oil was brought, how there were storms faced during constructions and the different items that go into the whole process. We learnt about the products and by-products of the process and the different uses. The refinery had almost 0% of waste as it used all the by-products for some reason or the other. This entire process was confidential, so we weren’t allowed to take pictures throughout the trip of any building etc.

Some ideas and questions that I found quite informative and interesting were the fact that the CSR activity of Reliance was planting trees and maintaining the biggest the orchard in Asia.

After the learning center we took a bus tour of the refinery. We couldn’t get off nor could we take pictures, but we saw the storage containers of crude and refined oil, by-products storage and places where they were being used or shipped out. After this tour was one of the highlights of the trip – the control room. An airconditioned building surrounded by a fountain and lake, we saw a model of the petrochemical plant and township, and the guide explained all that we saw. There were two refineries in the complex, one built in 1998 and one in 2008 called J1 and J2, with J3, a new refinery being made.

The control room was not how I imagined it all. It looked exactly like the mission control room of NASA, with huge screens and many tables with numerous laptops. We were kind of in a viewing box on top where we could see people control and monitor the different parts of the plant remotely. It was state-of-the-art technology, and I fell in love with this room.

Another highlight of the refinery part of the trip was the visit to the Jetty. Jamnagar is close to the sea, and so the crude oil being imported is easily accessible. Huge ships cannot really come in to close to the shore and must be in the deep and we can’t build a huge pipeline with so many bifurcations into the deep sea. So, Reliance uses SPMs, or Single Point Mooring Systems. These are basically pumps that are connected to ships through two pipes. The SPMS then relay the pumped oil through different pipes, running on the bottom of the sea, to the main pipe that brings the oil to the mainland. There are also docking points for smaller ships near the coast. This entire concept is really fascinating, and I enjoyed learning the principle behind it.

After another 1 ½ hours of more playing time we went back to the guest house to freshen up. Just before crashing on the bed, the teachers dropped a bombshell: We all had to perform the next day on a stage made especially for us in front of senior Reliance members. Immediately the work of song editing and management was dumped on a friend and me. Trust me, it wasn’t easy working on an unfamiliar outdated laptop.

The next morning we began the day by planting trees in a lot in the hot sun. To remain ‘professional’ we had to wear full pants throughout the trip and I picked the wrong day to wear my tight jeans. We had to dig a hole, place a tree sapling in it, cover the whole and water it. It was good fun. We also visited the mango orchard, where more than 150 variety of mango was grown. It is the biggest mango orchard in Asia. What is even more commendable is that this orchard was made on arid, barren land where water is extremely scarce. They explained the entire process to us, how the water is used and where it comes from and the different types of fruits in the orchard.

One of the most exclusive processes in the Reliance Jamnagar Facility was the Algae to Oil process. This process converts the carbon dioxide respired into the algae to oil. This is brilliant, as on a larger scale this process can produce crude oil without us having to deplete the worlds limited resources and cause destruction. We saw the production of algae, which is then put in large ponds and multiply. We saw the actual ponds as well and saw a video and presentation of for the same.

As this was a township there was a supermarket and obviously, a recreational center. There was a movie theater, arcade and even bowling! We spent half an hour, zipping around playing arcade games and bowling. The movie we watched afterwards is not important at all, and frankly made no sense whatsoever (like honestly, I had more fun reading memes on the movie). The name of the movie is unimportant, to protect its identity.

The performance we had been all preparing for the previous evening was that night. In-charge of music and compering, there was no need to dance, but I did that anyway. We had numerous plays, some extremely fun in their own ways. We saw lots of dances – Indian classical and Bollywood, Western and whatever our dance classified as. We had songs as welll and topped off the evening by dancing to Tunak Tunak. No one can go wrong with some classic Daler Mehndi. We had a gala dinner with chicken kababs with brilliant chutney. And that’s that.

This trip was extremely informative and fun together, and it was a pleasure being a part of it.