Coal news and updates

Coal India gets own wagons

Coal India is planning to deploy its own wagons to carry coal in 2016.

The public sector miner is investing over Rs 500 crore to procure specialised wagons each with a carrying capacity of around 80 tonnes of coal.

Coal India sources said they would deploy 30 rakes in the South Eastern Coalfields and Mahanadi Coalfields.

These subsidiaries will play a crucial role in helping the PSU to reach the 1-billion-tonne production target by 2019-20.

"Initially, the rakes will not move over long distances to minimise the turnaround time. We are working with the railways on movement of the rakes and depending upon the progress we may consider expanding further," a senior company official said.

The move to deploy its own rakes will speed up coal evacuation and increase offtake. At present, Coal India relies on Indian Railways for the availability of wagons.

The average rakes loaded per day have seen only a marginal improvement in 2014-15 at 194.5 rakes per day compared with 190.2 rakes per day in the year-ago period.

"This year, the availability has been good, which has translated into better offtake," the official said.

In the first eight months of the fiscal, the offtake has grown 9.8 per cent amid concerns of power plants over excess supply.

As on December 16, the power plants had a stock of 22 days. More than 70 per cent of coal supplied by Coal India goes to the power sector.

Critical projects

The central government has identified three railway infrastructure projects as critical to boost coal evacuation as part of the 1-billion-tonne production target.

These are located in Jharkhand (Central Coalfields Ltd), Odisha (Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd) and Chhattisgarh (South Eastern Coalfields Ltd).

Union coal minister Piyush Goyal has also specified the likely timelines for the projects - the first two being June 2016 and the third being December 2017.

Coal India sources said land acquistion challenges were being sorted out with the support of the state government.

Work on the Chhattisgarh project has progressed, but meeting the deadline for the other two projects can pose a challenge for Coal India.

In a reply to the Lok Sabha, Goyal said the public sector miner had planned to invest Rs 8,615.69 crore in these three projects.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com