[diginova]

My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for real. Truly marvellous outcome of perseverance and engineering. Loved to see this blog on the HN homepage, its very well written

[mandeepj]

It’s worth mentioning here - the founder (Dhiru bhai) of Reliance used to pump gas in Dubai and that’s where he got the dream to start his own refinery one day. Dream one side, but just going about setting up such a giant production facility at an enormous scale is nothing short of an extraordinary achievement. Pretty sure he had overflow of grit, commitment, and all around strength, and of course high dose of highest level of talent.

[damnitbuilds]

Nah, he did it the old-fashioned way - by corruption and dirty dealing, then his family suppressed the people reporting the truth:

https://archive.ph/i3FWt

[caminante]

They're still playing above the law and read anti-corruption regulations as "how to" manuals.

[Gud]

Any source for this claim that Ambani started his career as a gas pumper? Or are do you mean someone else?

[spot5010]

My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.

[throwaway7783]

Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.

[alephnerd]

Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well.

It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.

What a massive shift in just 25 years.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...

[caminante]

Not really a big deal. The numbers are cumulative. The Reliance Brownsville Texas facility will only process 60 million barrels per year. That's 1% of annual US refining capacity.

> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain

You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.

[mlinhares]

When all you can produce are finance bros this is the result.

[newyankee]

Wow, I had seen the inside of the refinery still partly under construction way back in 2003 when I was barely out of my teens.

[KolibriFly]

That must be an incredible place to grow up around