Born on 18th November 1963, Mr R K Jha grew up in Barauni Refinery Township. He completed his schooling at Barauni, higher secondary from Science College, Patna and B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from BIT, Sindri.

Mr Jha holds national certification for Energy Manager and has completed online Hybrid Certificate programme on Business Leadership from U21 Global Graduate School, Singapore. He is also Lead Auditor for EnMs (Energy Management System) ISO 500001:2011.

With over 33 years of experience in Oil & Gas industry, he has significantly contributed in mainstream operations, technical services and energy conservation. He joined Bongaigaon Refinery & Petrochemicals Limited in the year 1989 as a Management Trainee which was merged with IndianOil in the year 2009. Mr Jha has been instrumental in achieving significant milestones for Bongaigaon and Barauni Refineries of IndianOil.  He has been a champion of Energy Management and Environment Consciousness. He is an ardent believer that, the value of any organization is established by its care towards its people which includes providing safe work set-up and concern towards the environment which includes nurturing and conserving our mother earth and its biodiversity.

His technical achievements include:

• Being instrumental in successfully implementing Energy conservation projects at Bongaigaon Refinery which conferred three national awards on Energy conservation to Bongaigaon.
• At Bongaigaon Refinery, he was instrumental in improvement of Gross Refinery Margin (GRM) for which he successfully implemented many schemes such as:
  • Low level heat Recovery Project in CDU-I to preheat the DM water for use in Power plant,
  • Diversion of H2 rich gas ex- Catalytic Reformer Unit (CRU) to Diesel Hydro treatment Unit (DHDT) for the reduction of Hydrogen Generation Unit (HGU) load,
  • Step-less control in DHDT Make-up Compressor, Hot feed maximization in the Process units,
  • Maximization of cracked feed in DHDT to 40% against the design of 19%,
  • Condensate & Flash steam Recovery System from all the process units,
  • tank farm areas & offsites, improvement of Coker furnace efficiency from 83 % to 87% through installation of addl. rows in convection zone, Low NOx burner,
  • Ceramic Fiber module in Radiation zone, Flare Gas Recovery System (FGRS) based on Liquid Ring Compressor to recover the flare and utilization of the same Boilers/Heaters,
  • Utilization of DHDT off-gas as feed to HGU to reduce feed Naphtha and thereby maximization of MS,
  • By-passing of the Naphtha Splitter column of CDU for pre-heat improvement,
  • Installation of Auto decantation valve in the product tankage for auto draining of water,
  • Use of extraction steam from STG for atomizing, tracing & tank heating instead of direct steam driven from Boilers,
  • Installation of FRP blades in Cooling Tower & Fin-fan coolers,
  • Optimization of STG cooling water flow to condenser through process modification etc.
• At Barauni Refinery, he successfully led the team for the commissioning, and Stabilization of new facilities such as
  • Diesel Exhaust Fluid Unit, Barauni
  • indJet Unit for production of ATF with make in India technology
  • Asia’s 1st & World’s 3rd Green Cooling Tower
  • New Continuous Catalytic Reformer Unit (CCRU) along with Hydro-treating, Naphtha Splitter and Bensat units,
  • New Prime G+ unit to meet the BS-VI MS (Petrol) requirements,
  • New Amine Regeneration Unit,
  • Revamp of Coker Unit to increase capacity and processing of high sulphur in the feed,
  • Revamp of DHDT unit to increase the processing capacity to meet BS-VI HSD (Diesel) norms and HSD demand,
  • Biturox unit to produce different grades of Bitumen,
  • New Flue Gas Cooler in RFCCU for steam generation from waste heat,
  • Revamp of existing Prime G+ unit for lower sulphur production,
  • Crude oil loading facility from rake  ex- Barauni Refinery to Guwahati Refinery  for better capacity utilization,
  • RO plant in Biological Treatment Plant (BTP) to reduce the fresh water consumption,
  • Long term scheme for ethanol blended motor spirit (E-12 EBMS) and premium high octane MS XP-100.
• He also championed historical achievement of highest ever crude throughput of 6.66 MMTPA in 2018-19 at Barauni Refinery.

He is married to Ms. Kamna Jha who is a social activist and actively engages in socio-economic upliftment programmes for the underprivileged and needy in Begusarai. She is also the president of the ladies club of Barauni Refinery. They have two wonderful daughters who are well-settled and creating their niche in respective professional and personal lives.