The short version. Most Indian airports still receive jet fuel by tanker truck. PNGRB itself said as much in a February 2024 consultation paper, noting that "only a limited number of airports are linked with pipelines" and that even where a pipeline exists it typically isn't open to more than the one refiner that built it. This piece counts roughly six to eight airports with an existing dedicated line (Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kochi, Kolkata, with Lucknow and Bhubaneswar less certain) against six more authorised or under active bidding since 2022 — Navi Mumbai, Noida's Jewar, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, a second Bengaluru line and Visakhapatnam's Bhogapuram — timed almost exactly to India's wave of new airport openings. The regulatory story underneath the construction story is arguably the more interesting one: PNGRB is now bidding these new lines out as "common" or "contract" carriers open to competing fuel suppliers, a deliberate break from how the older lines were built.

6–8Airports with an existing dedicated ATF pipeline, by this piece's count

~157–165Operational airports nationwide, 2024–26 government figures

6New ATF pipelines authorised or at active bidding, 2022–2026

8.85 MTIndia's ATF consumption, calendar year 2024 (PPAC via S&P Global), +9.2% y/y

Why pipe jet fuel at all

Aviation turbine fuel is the one major petroleum product India still moves mostly the slow way. PPAC data cited by S&P Global put India's ATF consumption at 8.85 million tonnes in calendar year 2024, up 9.2% on the year before, after a reported 11.8% jump in FY2023-24 and a 47.1% jump the year before that — a demand curve driven by India's post-pandemic aviation boom and its wave of new airport capacity under the UDAN regional-connectivity scheme. PNGRB's own February 2024 consultation paper is unusually blunt about the resulting bottleneck: "ATF is transported by road and rail network and only a limited number of airports are linked with pipelines. Even where pipelines are there, they are not on an open access basis." The same paper states plainly that "pipelines are the cheapest mode of transport for liquid fuels" and proposes that new pipelines be built accessible to any fuel supplier, not just the one that lays the pipe — the regulatory shift this piece traces through the second half of this article.

The airports that already have a pipeline

By this piece's count, a firm dedicated ATF pipeline exists today at six airports, with two more reported but less certain. Bengaluru's Kempegowda International Airport was first, in October 2008: Indian Oil laid a 36-km line from its Devanagonthi terminal, at a reported cost of roughly ₹33 crore, sized initially at over 156,000 litres an hour and described at the time as scalable past 220,000 litres an hour; contemporary press reported it replaced more than 30 tanker-truck trips a day. PNGRB's own committee report confirms the 36 km figure exactly (naming the line "Devangonthi–Devanhalli"), gives its declared common-carrier capacity as 0.7 MMTPA, and records it running at 116.2% of that capacity in FY26. Delhi's IGI Airport is fed through an Indian Oil line from a facility at Bijwasan into the airport's dedicated fuelling company (DAFFPL), reportedly carrying around 6,000 kilolitres a day, drawing on Indian Oil's Mathura–Delhi and Panipat–Bijwasan product pipelines; the same committee report lists the "Panipat–Bijwasan" line by name at 111 km, 1 MMTPA, running at 111.1% utilisation in FY26. Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport turns out to be fed by two separate pipelines, not one: the committee report lists an HPCL "Mumbai Refinery–Mumbai International Airport" line at 20 km, 0.5 MMTPA, running at 99.3% utilisation, and a second, separate BPCL line to "Mumbai Refinery–Mumbai International Airport (Santacruz)" at 12 km, 1.3 MMTPA, running at 70% — this piece's earlier reporting only found the HPCL line. Both feed the same dedicated fuel-farm joint venture (Mumbai Aviation Fuel Farm Facility, jointly owned by the airport operator, Indian Oil, BPCL and HPCL) with static storage of 47,500 kilolitres, built at a reported cost of ₹653.08 crore. Chennai has an Indian Oil line from Chennai Petroleum's Manali refinery to the airport's fuel station, named in the committee report as "Chennai ATF": 95 km, 0.2 MMTPA, running at 150.6% of capacity in FY26. Kochi's Cochin International Airport draws on a BPCL line from its Kochi refinery; the committee report gives this exactly as "Kochi Refinery–Kochi Airport," 34 km (this piece's earlier "roughly 33-km" estimate was close but not exact), 0.6 MMTPA, running at 103.3%. Kolkata's Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport has been supplied via an Indian Oil pipeline from its Mourigram terminal since around October 2018, per a reference in a Calcutta High Court judgment; the committee report lists it as "Kolkata ATF," 27 km, 0.2 MMTPA, running at 97.5%.

Lucknow's status, which this piece had reported as an unresolved conflict between industry submissions calling it pipeline-fed and tanker-supplied, is now resolved: the same committee report lists a "Lucknow ATF" pipeline by name in PNGRB's own dedicated-pipeline register — Indian Oil, 6 km, 0.2 MMTPA, running at only 36.2% of capacity in FY26. It is real, current, and named in an official register; the 2019 environmental-clearance filing and 2025 fuel-farm tender this piece found separately fit that confirmation rather than contradicting it. Bhubaneswar, where a roughly 16-km Indian Oil line from its Jatni terminal was put out to tender in 2021, does not appear in the committee report's pipeline list, so this piece still cannot confirm the tender resulted in a commissioned pipeline. Hyderabad's Rajiv Gandhi International Airport and Goa's Mopa airport, by contrast, are both reported to run on tanker-fed fuel farms today, which is precisely why both now have a dedicated pipeline in the works (see below).

Six new lines, timed to five new or expanding airports

This 2021 process describes the pipeline's origin, not necessarily the one that was ultimately built: PNGRB's eventual authorisation in February 2023 went to Bharat Petroleum rather than Indian Oil, and trade press describes that authorised route as originating at a "Piyala terminal" rather than at Palwal. This piece cannot establish from the 2021 document whether "Piyala" in later reporting refers to the same "Piyala Depot" that Sanmarg's 2021 submission separately named as a BPCL facility on the Mumbai–Manmad–Bijwasan pipeline (suggested there only as an alternative ATF source to explore, not as the eventual route), whether the two are coincidentally similar names, or whether later reporting has simply conflated Palwal and Piyala — both are place names in the same stretch of Haryana. What is confirmed, directly from the primary document, is that a Palwal-anchored, Indian-Oil-led proposal existed in early 2021, at 36 km and 2.50 million tonnes a year, and that it was not the version PNGRB eventually authorised two years later.

Two further routes surfaced only as proposals still in PNGRB's consultation process, with no confirmed authorisation: a roughly 20-km line from Sempora to Srinagar airport, sized at 0.5 MMTPA, on which PNGRB opened consultation in April 2025; and a line to Pune's airport referenced in HPCL's submission to a related PNGRB consultation, with no route length or capacity given. This piece found no pipeline proposal, authorised or otherwise, for several other new airports opened or under construction in this period — Dholera, Purandar, Hirasar (Rajkot) and Mopa (Goa) among them — which appear, on the sources available, to remain tanker-supplied for now. A follow-up search also surfaced two further mentions too thin to place in the table above: a possible second, separate proposal for a Navi Mumbai line (referenced only as "VNPL", with no route, length or capacity given, and no clarity on whether it duplicates or supplements the Indian Oil line already authorised), and a single passing reference to a proposed line serving Goa's older Dabolim airport, distinct from Mopa. Neither could be corroborated by a second source and both are reported here only so a reader chasing this topic further knows they exist as leads, not as confirmed projects.

The regulatory shift: from captive line to open pipeline

Under the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board Act, 2006, a pipeline built to supply a specific consumer — as opposed to a "common carrier" open to any shipper on equal terms — can be classified as a "dedicated" pipeline, which historically has meant it sits outside the Act's open-access rules. Every airport pipeline built before roughly 2022, on the sources this piece found, fits that pattern: a single oil marketing company built a line from its own refinery or terminal to a single airport's fuel farm, supplying that airport and no other customer.

PNGRB's February 2024 consultation paper set out to change that going forward, explicitly proposing that ATF pipelines to airports be built "accessible to any supplier" rather than tied to the builder's own fuel. The practical effect shows up in how the newest lines have actually been structured: PNGRB bid the Navi Mumbai, Jewar and Hyderabad pipelines out competitively as common or contract carriers rather than simply letting the incumbent refiner build a captive line, and separately declared Indian Oil's existing Bengaluru line a common or contract carrier, with Indian Oil's own capacity filing splitting that line's approved 0.66 million-tonne capacity into 0.16 million tonnes reserved as common-carrier capacity and 0.44 million tonnes for Indian Oil's own use. Industry submissions to the same 2024 consultation give a sense of who is actually asking for this: the Association of Private Airport Operators told PNGRB that Delhi's existing pipeline moves around 6,000 kilolitres a day and pushed for more airports to get equivalent, competitively-supplied infrastructure; the aviation industry body IATA made its own submission in January 2025 pressing the same point. A PNGRB Expert Committee report on petroleum-product logistics, read in full for this blog's companion piece on that report, independently confirms the pattern: the seven existing ATF lines it tables (Lucknow aside) run between 70% and 150.6% of nameplate capacity in FY26 — a sharp contrast with the roughly 50% utilisation this blog's companion piece on the trunk gas-pipeline network describes for that far larger system, and a data point PNGRB can reasonably point to as evidence that building more airport pipelines, and opening them to competing suppliers, is worth doing.

What doesn't follow from any of this

None of this shows the pre-2022 captive pipelines at Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kochi or Kolkata were built badly or are being operated improperly — "dedicated" and "captive" describe a lawful, longstanding category of pipeline under the 2006 Act, and PNGRB's push for open access on new lines is a policy preference about future construction, not a finding that the existing lines are deficient. Nor does existing ATF pipelines' generally high utilisation (mostly 70–150% of nameplate capacity in the confirmed FY26 figures above, Lucknow's 36.2% the clear exception) mean every new line will fill up as quickly: several of the newly authorised lines serve brand-new airports (Navi Mumbai, Jewar, Bhogapuram) whose passenger and cargo traffic, and therefore fuel demand, will take years to ramp to the level the pipeline was sized for, in the same way this blog's companion piece describes India's newer gas trunk lines running well under capacity while demand catches up. And the absence of a found pipeline proposal for airports such as Dholera, Purandar, Hirasar or Mopa is not proof no such proposal exists — it means this piece's search-based research did not surface one, which for a fast-moving regulatory process with many bid notices published directly to PNGRB's own website is a real gap, not a confirmed absence.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.