Indian Oil Corp. Ltd, the largest of the three big oil marketers, is exploring opportunities for setting up battery charging stations and battery replacement facilities for electric vehicles in its petrol pumps. “We are also looking at opportunities for manufacturing and retailing lithium-ion batteries,” the company said in its annual report for 2016-17.

The rating agency expected dividend payments by the three companies to drop modestly in 2017-18, but remain higher than in 2015-16. The government expects to receive Rs67,500 crore of dividends from all state-owned companies in 2017-18, less than Rs77,000 crore estimated to have been received in 2016-17, but more than double than Rs30,800 crore in 2015-16.

The public sector oil retailer will spend the money on capacity expansion of refineries as well as marketing and upstream activities, its chairman and managing director D Rajkumar told reporters at a post-AGM press meet here late evening.

This will be part of the company’s overall road map to spend Rs 1.08 lakh crore till 2021-22. “Including our subsidiaries, our refining capacity is somewhere about 31 mt, we are planning to move closer to 50 mt by somewhere around 2022. This will see an investment of approximately about Rs 18,000 crore,” D Rajkumar, chairman and managing director of BPCL, told Business Standard.

Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) gained 5% to Rs 388, while Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL) surged 4.4% to Rs 401 and Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) rose 3% to Rs 499 on BSE in intra-day trade. On comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 159 points or 0.49% at 32,318 at 10:25 am.

In June, BPCL had terminated the allotment on the grounds that Tej, a minister in the state government, had furnished false information and concealed facts when he applied for the pump in 2012.

BPCL is the second Indian refiner to buy U.S. Gulf crude after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Washington last month when President Donald Trump said the United States looked forward to exporting more energy products to the world's third-biggest oil buyer.

The board of directors of L&T and BPCL during last week of May, 2017, had approved issue of bonus shares in the ratio of 1:2 (i.e. one bonus equity share for every two fully paid equity shares held). L&T has fixed July 14, while BPCL fixed July 15 as the record date to identify eligible shareholders for the purpose of bonus shares.