KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – Coal India Limited (CIL) has increased its production during the month of September, enabling the miner to reverse the negative growth trend for the first half of the 2017/18 financial year.
However, even after stepping up September production and reversing the negative growth trend of previous months, the miner fell about 5% short of its internal first-half production target.
CIL grew its production by 10.1% during September, which enabled the company to post positive growth during the second quarter of the financial year, compared with the negative growth during the first quarter.
Company officials pointed out that September’s production growth was higher than any other corresponding month of the previous four financial years.
However, the optimism was tempered by the fact that CIL, during the first half of the financial year, was able to produce 231.87-million tons, against a production target of 243.3-million tons, which the company had filed with stock exchanges at start of the current financial year.
At a time when thermal power plants were claiming shortages of dry fuel, CIL officials said that it had witnessed a sharp rise in offtake during September, which was recorded at 43.58-million tons against 42.34-million tons during corresponding month of the previous fiscal period.
Disaggregated data showed that supply to thermal power plants during the month was 35-million tons, against 29-million tons during the corresponding month of previous financial year.
CIL officials said that despite the erratic production during the first half of 2017/18, the miner would be able to achieve the full-year production target of 600-million tons.
Interestingly, the Indian government in April 2017 pruned CIL’s production target from 660-million tons during 2017/18 to 600-million tons, forecasting tepid demand for the dry fuel, particularly from thermal power plants.
The decision to cut the production target was rendered incorrect by the sharp rise in demand for electricity in the subsequent months. From a decade low plant load factor (PLF) of about 52% in April 2017, the Central Electricity Authority projects this to rise to 59% to 60% by the close of the current financial year, compared with a 59.66% PLF achieved in 2016/17.