KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – Acknowledging transportation and logistical bottlenecks as large contributing factors to dry fuel shortages at end-users plants, Coal India Limited (CIL) is drawing up plans to acquire its own railway wagons.
The five-year plan will entail CIL acquiring its own wagons to transport coal to thermal power plants and depending on government transporter Indian Railways (IR) only for haulage across its tracks and not for supplying rakes for coal loading and transportation.
The miner believes that besides the capital expenditure (capex) entailed in procurement of own rakes, which in turn could be amortised over a period of time, it will lead to considerable savings in transportation charges to IR and the saving could be passed on to coal consumers among power generation companies, officials say.
It is estimated that CIL pays about $5.6-billion a year to IR for providing rakes and transporting coal to consumers. CIL on average loaded 260 rakes a day for coal transportation, which as per projected fuel demand of power companies, is expected to rise to about 288 rakes a day in the coming financial year.
The country’s largest power producer, NTPC, reckons that it lost about 10.6-billion units of electricity generation on an aggregate from all its operational plants owing to shortages of coal.
CIL's 'own-your-wagon' plan is actually a revival of an old scheme shelved several years ago, when the miner had not been able to justify the capex in terms of definite rate of returns, officials say.
While details of the new revived plans are still in the works, the earlier plan entailed an investment of about $78-million to acquire 2 000 wagons.
However, the issue facing the miner in framing the ‘own-your-wagon’ scheme was that these wagons would have to return to pitheads empty after unloading of coal at thermal power plants, resulting in idle capacity and extra costs.
One of the options is to allow IR to load noncoal freight on CIL wagons on its return leg with the former paying lease rental to the miner.
As per Power Ministry planning for the 2018/19 financial year, total coal demand for thermal power plants has been pegged at 603-million tons, of which supplies of 513-million tons were expected to come from CIL and the balance of 90-million tons from Singareni Collieries as well as captive blocks operated by power companies. Transporting this volumes to power plant sites will require an average loading of 288 rakes a day.