kochi with projections of a steep increase in covid cases in ernakulam the district administration and petroleum explosives safety organization peso have been working to ramp up the availability of oxygen supplies to meet the demand and prevent any kind of shortageat a meeting on tuesday district collector asked the industries department to ensure availability of oxygen cylinders for storage of medical oxygen these will be kept aside for medical purposes till the covid crisis is overcomeoxygen used for industrial purposes is purer than medical oxygen peso officials who attended the meeting said action would be taken against the illegal transfer of industrial oxygen cylinders they said that the supply of oxygen from karnataka to kerala will not be disrupted the collector also directed the industries department to ensure the availability of valves required for the use of these industrial cylinders which would be storing medical oxygenmeanwhile public sector companies have come up to ensure steady supply of oxygen to hospitals after peso intervened with a request to bpcl kochi refinery kr to support with supplies bpclkr has 17 tonnes of liquid oxygen available now they started the production from april 14 and their daily production capacity ranges from 08 to 3 tonnes from monday they have begun sending oxygen to hospitals free of cost said r venugopal deputy chief controller of explosives peso and nodal officer medical oxygen monitoring kerala lakshadweephe said that as of now ernakulam has 93238 metric tonnes mt of total storage capacity of liquid medical oxygen lmo the cylinder filling capacity per day is 2857 metric tonnes there are four air separation units asus and two filling plants which are a major part of the oxygen supply network for the state across the state there are 11 asus with 4265mtday this includes ernakulam 4 palakkad 1 kannur 1 malappuram 1 thrissur 2 alappuzha 1 and thiruvananthapuram 1allaying concerns of any crisis with related to oxygen supply venugopal said it is possible to ramp up our production in case of any emergency presently all filling plants are not running at 100 capacity if demand is there we can boost it to go for 100 productionas of now 35 mtday is the consumption for covid care and 45 mtday for noncovid care last year it was a total of 100 mt covid and noncovidvenugopal said that the crisis management plan for the state includes 24x7 production of all plants and maximum supply through gas cylinders to hospitals across the state we have given a maximum bulk storage licence at hospitals and are regularly reviewing the stocks he addedunlike a situation where many states were caught napping the management of medical oxygen was put in place last year itself when there was a sudden shortage of oxygen in hospitals peso initiated the oxygen monitoring with the health department production companies and kerala medical services corporation kmscl we started with calculating the oxygen requirement of each patient and ensuring optimal