BHUBANESWAR: Reeling under a crisis of coal supply from Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL), National Aluminium Company Limited (Nalco) has moved to import coal. It has placed an order for two lakh tonne of coal and the supply is expected within a week. The decision was taken by a Committee of Directors of Nalco. “We were losing around `1 crore a day due to short supply of coal from the linkage provided to us by MCL. An average of 7,400 tonne of coal a day against a requirement of 12,000 tonne was being received for the last two weeks,” Nalco CMD BL Bagra said. Sourcing coal from the MCL, Nalco’s 1,200 MW thermal captive power plant at Angul provides power to the company’s smelter. Due to the short supply, 60 of the 960 operational pots in the smelter had to be shut down from September 8. The smelter produces around 37,000 tonne of metal a month. Though the production may decline slightly by around 2,100 to 2,400 tonne due to the disruption, the current crisis will not affect the company’s annual output targets, Bagra asserted. To overcome the crisis, the company reached out to the ministries of Mines, Coal and the Railways. The Coal Ministry advised MCL to arrange supply of coal from other mines located in Talcher and Ib belt. Acting on the instructions, MCL has opened supplies from Hingula and Kanika mines and the movement from these two has helped Nalco in salvaging the situation to an extent. However, there is still much shortfall. “In fact the smelter is still operating by sourcing 100 MW of power from the State grid,” the CMD added.
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