India's Hindustan Petroleum Corp has tripled an annual crude import deal with Iran for 2009/10 while Bharat Petroleum Corp may not buy crude from Tehran, company sources.

HPCL will ship in 60,000 bpd of Iranian crude in the year beginning April after National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) raised the credit period to 90 days, a company source said. NIOC normally gives 30 days credit on its crude exports.

'Our term imports will be same as last year at about 11 million tonnes (220,000 bpd). The only change is that we have increased Iran volumes and accordingly reduced Iraq's Basrah light,' the source said.

HPCL has reduced the Iraq's Basrah Light crude volumes to 25,000 bpd from the previous year's 65,000 bpd after a review of its crude import strategy, the source said.

Another state refiner, BPCL sees a marginal decline in its annual term crude volumes as it may not buy Iranian crude in the next fiscal.

'We were buying small volume of 5,000 bpd, but next year we may not buy that because of operational problems and less margins. It was not proving good in our system', said a BPCL official.

A BPCL spokesman said the firm's annual crude import strategy is 'confidential', while no comment was available from HPCL.

BPCL has entered into a six month deal to buy 10,000 bpd Al-Shaheen grade from Qatar Petroleum but it aims to buy another 5,000 bpd during October-March.

'We plan to keep Al-Shaheen volumes at this year's level of 0.75 million tonnes (15,000 bpd)', the source said.-Reuters