Doesn't seem likely. I have heard the refineries have asked for an extension to the November deadline. April 2019, maybe, at the earliest. But it could be up to at least another year because local refineries have to make significant investment to infrastructure to be able to produce high volumes of the 95,97 Ron fuel.
As far as I know, if they start production with existing distillation columns, the volume output will decrease significantly and raw material cost would increase as well. At the end of the day that would hit our import bill.
As we all know by now, when in 2016 the govt forced the refineries to introduce better quality fuel, instead of doing it right the first time and updating their production processes ( which, btw, in '16 the dollar was at 105-107 and euro at 115 ish, and would have have been much more economical) they decided to do jugaar with MMT addition which completely destroyed the initial batches of civic X Turbo engines.
Which btw, Honda had explicitly stated in their Turbo brochures, when launched, about only using Hi octane fuel. This is standard practice all around the world where manufactures recommend a certain fuel quality when buying a new car, especially an engine that was brand new.
Honda recommending higher fuel quality started an up roar with the masses and alot of them disregarded Honda and used regular fuel anyway. The rest, as we say, is history!
One last thing, as far as I know, MMT levels in india are 0 % since fricken 2004. And we are having this discussion in 2018. Yet, humain Kashmir azaad krna hai. That was a joke!
