Coal news and updates

J K Lakshmi Durg unit mulls replacing desi coal with pet coke

September 22: J K Lakshmi Cement Ltd is evaluating plans to replace domestic coal with imported coal or petroleum coke at its upcoming 3 million tons per annum (mtpa) greenfield cement plant at Durg in Chhattisgarh as it expects difficulty in procuring coal through e-auction due to the government directive to coal companies to reduce e-auction volumes, a company official told ICMW.

J K Lakshmi Cement does not have linkages to procure domestic coal for the plant and it was planning to buy the material through e-auction.

“At present, we are using up to 90% pet coke at our cement plant in Rajasthan (Udaipur). However, for our upcoming greenfield plant at Durg, we were planning to use 50% pet coke and 40% domestic coal. But with the recent change in the government policy, we may follow the same fuel pattern at our Rajasthan plant,” the official said.

“The balance 10% coal for the Udaipur plant is procured from South Africa for blending to reduce the impact of high sulphur in pet coke and it was planned to be the same for the Durg plant as well,” the official added.

J K Lakshmi’s Durg plant is expected to be lighted up in October, but stabilisation will take some time.

The company has, at present, a total cement production capacity of 6.7 mtpa with only one plant at Udaipur in Rajasthan. It is planning to increase the capacity at Udaipur through brownfield expansion to 9 mtpa by 2016-17 that will increase its total cement production capacity to 12 mtpa from 9.7 mt expected by the end of the current financial year.

 “We recently purchased a small parcel of imported pet coke for our Durg plant. We will go for trial and check if the material brought from the US suits us or not. But one thing is for sure that we will try all sorts of combinations such as imported coal, domestic coal as well as pet coke to arrive at the best energy utilisation ratio,” the official said.

“In case there is difficulty in getting domestic coal, we will have no option other than to buy pet coke. We are seriously looking at imported or domestic pet coke in the absence of domestic steam coal,” the official added.

The official pointed out that, at present, J K Lakshmi Cement’s pet coke consumption is only about 0.55 million tons (mt), which it plans to increase to 1 mt by 2016-17, but with anticipated problems in procuring domestic coal, the quantity of pet coke imports may go up.