Coal news and updates

As much as 70% of Coal India's 49 million tonne (mt) of coal stock is unusable because it cannot be evacuated and supplied to power plants when required. That means a dramatic drop in the company's accessible stock to just 16 mt. Despite its best efforts, Coal India managed to reduce stock by just 9 million tonne in 2013-14 .

 

Over the past several years, the company has been maintaining a huge stock on its books but most of this has turned out to be of little use. "Some 33 million tonne of stock is lying in locations where transportation is an issue. The coal from these regions cannot be evacuated at short notice mainly due to issues with the railways. For example , 8-9 million stocks have been lying in the Basundhara mines but the High Court in Orissa has ruled that loading has been barred during the day," said CIL chairman S Narsingh Rao.

 

A senior CIL official said: "As coal remains dumped on ground, it either gets pilfered or gets mixed with ground soil rendering a large part of it unusable . CIL has not done a fresh assessment of this dumped coal over the years, neither has it written off the unusable coal from its books."

 

Despite having missed its production target by some 20 million tonne, CIL could not evacuate more than 9 million tonne from its stock of a total 57.8 million tonne mainly due to transport availability issues. In most of the cases, the coal is lying in areas where railways cannot send adequate rakes for this coal to be moved.

 

CIL had, in fact, offered its customers the option of picking up coal from the stock yards but that met with little success because of the inaccessibility of the locations. The scheme was offered in 2012 and is still valid but only a handful of companies have participated. For 2014-15 , the company has fixed a production target of 507 million tonne and a supply target of 520 million tonne. This will result in 9.6% growth from last year, if achieved. "We are preparing our strategies for achieving the target," he said.

 

 

Source: ET