KOLKATA, Nov 23: State owned Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) is considering a multi-pronged plan to ensure availability of adequate coking coal for steel industry to meet India’s 2020 vision of 300 million tons of steel making capacity.
The success and implementation of the plans would, however, depend on faster rehabilitation of settlers by the Jharia Rehabilitation and Development Authority (JRDA) to a safer place, Indian Coal Market Watch (ICMW) quoting a BCCI official as saying.
‘To expedite the process and help BCCL increase production, action needs to be taken by the JRDA while the state government needs to decide quickly on shifting old establishments like the Mineral Area Development Authority (MADA) etc from the coal-bearing areas to the non-coal bearing ones,’ the official maintained.
In addition, the company should be exempted by the state government from providing NOC for construction in the coal-bearing areas, he said.
BCCI has identified some sites like Gajlitand, Kankani and Jogta and was removing barriers between BCCL and Tata Collieries to enhance further high grade coking coal production and availability.
At present it operates 57 mines grouped into 12 areas. These were mostly spread over the Jharia Coalfields (Jharkhand), which have proven reserves of 15.13 billion tons and partly across the Raniganj Coalfield (West Bengal) which have proven reserves of 0.75 billion tons.
Of the total proven reserves in the Jharia Coalfields, 4.61 billion tons account for prime coking coal, 4.36 billion tons are medium coking and 6.15 billion tons, non-coking coal.
Another 0.70 billion tons of prime coking coal, 1.81 billion tons of medium coking and 1.80 billion tons of non-coking coal are, at present, under the indicated category.
Incidentally, the Jharia Coalfields are the sole repository of prime coking coal in India with a reserve base of 11.48 billion tons of mostly proven category of coking coal. Of the total seams in Jharia, seams IX to XVIII of Barakar Measures are of the prime variety, while the remaining seams are of high rank low volatile medium coking coal (LVHR) except a few lower seams, namely II, III and IV, which have poor coking propensity and are declared non-coking.
The company plans to increase its annual coal production to 40 million tons by 2021-22 from the expected 32.50 mt in 2013-14. Of this, the production of raw coking coal would be 37.89 mt and 28.17 mt respectively. (UNI)
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