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NTPC officials accuse CIL of mixing stones with coal

Two mounds made of stone and boulders that are about 20 feet high each have arisen suddenly next to NTPCBSE 0.92 %Farakka Thermal Power Station in West Bengal. Officials at the plant say they have been building these mounds, each containing at least 100 tonnes of stones, for some months now.


They aren't trying to set any records - the mounds contain stones and boulders  which came mixed with the coal supplied by Coal India Ltd ( CIlBSE -0.53 %) and which the power producer doesn't know what to do with.

NTPC's other thermal power plants such as Dadri and Unchar, West Bengal Power Development Corp. and CESC are also finding large quantities of stones in the coal they get from the state-run supplier
 
Officials at NTPC's Farakka plant say they have been getting stones with coal for years. The NTPC plant used to supply these stones for building embankments to the canals that supply water to the super thermal power station. But a few months ago, local authorities told the company that they don't need any more stones, a senior official said.


"We are being forced to stack them at our power plant area and it is growing at a considerable pace," the official said. "Till now we have stacked up two huge
mounds of pure stone sent by them (Coal India). Soon we will run out of space to stack them," the official added.


The stones and boulders that come with coal are segregated at various levels before the fuel is pulverized and charged into boilers.


The official said the company is forced to pay for the stones that come mixed with the coal. Coal India officials do not deny the chance of stones getting  mixed with coal. But, they do not agree with the allegation of deliberately sending large amounts of stones with coal.

There is a stipulation under which a minimum distance has to be maintained between overburden, or material such as rock of soil found above the actual coal deposit, and a coal seam.


But this is not always done, especially towards the end of the year when the pressure of fulfilling production targets is very high, leading to chunks of stones getting mixed with coal, former Coal India officials said.

NTPC officials, however, alleged that these are manually added to the coal to keep the weight same after the fuel is pilfered.

Coal could be pilfered after it is loaded into railway wagons, a Coal India official said, adding that the company doesn't get any incentives to replace the stolen coal with stones."They (stones) get mixed during extraction in the mines," he said, adding that it was difficult to differentiate between coal and stones covered with coal.


According to NTPC officials, presence of large quantities of stones increases the time to unload coal, delaying the availability of railway rakes to bring in more coal.

Stones mixed with coal also damage conveyor belts and result in cracks in the crusher machines, they said. This increases the down time, and adds to costs that NTPC cannot pass on to its consumers or Coal India, the officials added.


Source: The Economic Times