Introduction
India’s desire to be a developed country requires growth in its GDP at
an accelerated rate that requires massive investment in infrastructure and
power sectors. Manufacturing and construction sectors also require a boost to
build up the economy. Accordingly, there has been a significant progress in the
past few decades in the Indian Mining Sector, particularly in the mines
producing major minerals like coal, iron ore, bauxite, manganese and others.
Coal being a major input for the production of both power and steel acquires
significant importance in boosting country’s economy.
The scale of operation in coal mining has increased manyfold over the years. Individual mine capacity has increased to as high as 50 million tonnes per year. This has been possible by increasing the thrust in production from opencast mines. The opencast coal production has increased from the level of 16.4 million tonnes per annum at the time of coal mines nationalization in early seventies to 690.4 million tonnes in 2019-20.
Opencast & Underground Coal Production in the Past One Decade
If we analyse the domestic coal production of the past one decade, we find that the share of opencast production has been increasing and that from underground has been reducing, while there has been an overall growth in the total national coal production. All India raw coal production has increased from 539.95 MT (comprising 487.99 MT from OC and 51.96 MT from UG) in 2011-12 to 716.04 MT (comprising 684.86 MT from OC and 31.22 MT from UG) in 2020-21. In percentage terms while the total production has grown at a CAGR of 3.19%, that of OC production has grown at a CAGR of 3.84% and UG production has declined at a CAGR of 5.50%. In percentage terms the share of OC production has increased from 90.38% to 95.64% and that of UG production has decreased from 9.62% to 4.36% during the period 2011-12 to 2020-21. The trend of domestic coal production in the past 10 years is shown in Table-1.
Trend of domestic coal production in the past 10 years
(Production in MT)
Type-wise percentage production is shown in Figure-1.
Figure-1
Source:
Coal Statistics 2020-21, Published by Coal Controller of India.
Coal Consumption in India
Total coal consumption in India has been increasing over the years. The
domestic coal production and supply, not being enough to meet the country’s
demand, the quantum of coal imported from other countries is also rising year
after year. Total coal consumption in the year 2011-12 was 640.51 MT with a
imported component of 105.21 MT. These figures have increased to 908.35 MT and
217.46 MT respectively in the year 2020-21. Year-wise coal consumption showing
domestic supplies, imported coal and total consumption is shown in Figure-2.
Figure-2
Source: Data taken from Coal Statistics 2020-21
Domestic Coal Producers
Domestic coal production largely comes from Coal India Limited (CIL), followed by Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) and a number of other smaller public sector and private sector captive coal miners. In the year 2020-21, out of the total domestic production of 716.08 MT, public sector companies contributed 685.95 MT and private sector’s production was 30.13 MT. Table-2 shows the company-wise production from both OC and UG mines for the past two years.
Source:
Coal Statistics 2020-21, Published by Coal Controller of India.
Future Coal
Demand and Availability Scenario
The Coal Vision 2030 document of Ministry of Coal, published in 2019, envisaged overall coal demand for the country to be 900 – 1000 MT by 2020 and projected it to grow to 1300 – 1900 MT by 2030, depending on different scenarios of development in the country. While the projected demand for 2020 has more or less come true, the futuristic coal demand has wide range, as the nature of uncertainties in the ecosystem are also quite wide. By 2030, thermal coal demand is estimated to be 1150 – 1750 MT.
CIL has proposed to produce and supply 1000 MTPA by the year 2024. With the base of 602 MT at 2019-20, this will require a CAGR of more than 10%. Sustaining this type of growth consistently over next 4 years is a daunting task for CIL, particularly in view of a negative growth in the year 2020-21. It is also evident from Figure-2 that there has been a declining trend in the total coal consumption of the country over the past three years. One of the reasons for this decline is sited as the Covid Pandemic, which started in March 2020. However, the decline had started in the FY 2019-20 itself, even before the Pandemic influenced the coal consumption. The current FY 2021-22 shows increased domestic coal consumption with drastic decline in the import of coal. The overall coal consumption is likely to remain the same as that of last year or may slightly increase. This shows that growth in total coal consumption is unlikely to reach the level as projected in the Coal Vision 2030 Document. However, increased thrust of reducing the import of coal and meeting the demand largely through domestic coal production, puts onus on domestic coal producers to increase the production capacities.
Coal Import Concern
Coal import had started in the year 1985 itself for meeting the coking coal requirement. The quantity kept on growing thereafter but remained under 25 MT till 2001. Coal imports, excluding lignite, increased to 59 MT in 2008-09 and thereafter steeply rose up registering nearly 251 MT in 2019-20. This figure comprises nearly 54 MT of coking coal, coke and other products and about 197 MT of non-coking coal. Import of coal involves huge foreign exchange outgo. The Government is seriously concerned about this and therefore the thrust has been increased on reducing import of coal and meeting such requirements by increasing domestic coal production to the extent possible. Due to rising prices of the imported coal, the import component has reduced in the current fiscal to a great extent and the domestic coal consumption has increased. While it may not be possible to reduce import of coking coal due to its non-availability domestically, quantum of thermal coal import can definitely be reduced, particularly for the hinterland thermal power plants. Thus, the pressure is increasing on domestic coal producers to meet the country’s demand.
Planned Mine Capacities by Coal Producers
Quick ramp up of production is possible only by opening more high-capacity OC mines. Though, the coal sector is now open for commercial mining, the interest shown by the investors in the last two auctions has not been very enthusiastic. Established players in coal mining, therefore, like CIL and SCCL, will have to play a major role in augmenting coal production for meeting the country’s demand of coal.
Today the total number of mines with CIL is stated to be around 360. The size of mines has been on the increase over the years both in terms of area and the mine capacity. As on date CIL has 20 mines with annual capacity of more than 10 MTPA, contributing 380 MTPA, which is more than 50% of CIL’s current total production. It is also learnt that CIL has plans to increase the number of high-capacity mines to 35 with total capacity of 806 MTPA, ranging from 10 MTPA to 70 MTPA in the near future. SCCL also must have planned for augmenting coal production to the extent feasible.
Challenges in Meeting the Demand
As we have seen from the past production trend, contribution from underground mining has been shrinking and that from OC mining increasing year after year. There are several reasons for shrinkage of underground production and the scope of its increase at an accelerated rate is remote. The increase therefore has to come from expansion of existing OC mines and opening up more high-capacity OC mines. However, be it opencast or underground mines, the challenges in opening a mine these days are numerous that we can discuss in the following paragraphs.
Challenges in opening a Coal Mine
For opening any new coal mine or for expansion of existing mines, the most common challenges are faced by the project proponents in the form of:
- Social resistance to mining
- Getting different statutory clearances
- Delays due to political conflict between the Central and State Governments
- Availability of land
- Rehabilitation and resettlement of project affected people
Coal, though responsible for providing 55% of primary energy to the nation, is considered as a dirty fuel due to its inherent colour as well as its carbon emission contribution to the atmosphere. Coal mining, particularly opencast mining, is seen by the general mass as displacer of human settlements, polluter of environment – air, water & noise and causing distress to the local people due to loss of their traditional livelihood. As such, as the time is passing, the social resistance to coal mining is increasing manyfold. The resistance comes particularly from the project affected people and the environmentalists., though everybody wants electric power for better living. There have been instances of not allowing even exploration for coal in some parts of the country, leave aside opening a mine. Such misgivings of coal mining need to be allayed by the coal producers by demonstrating the real benefits of coal mining in that area and taking utmost care of the project affected people and maintaining the environmental standards during mining.
Coal production is greatly dependent on how fast the statutory clearances are given by the government for functionalization of a coal block. The process of getting clearances and the number of clearances required for starting a project is very large and cumbersome. Almost in all the approvals, both the Central and the State governments are involved, and it takes a lot of time before any clearance is reached. The time for bringing a coal project to production varies from five years for an open cast mine to about seven years for an underground mine. However, in practice, it is much more and depends on how much co-operative the two government agencies are. Though, the central government has declared to set up a single window clearance system for coal blocks, it only provides for Mining Plan approval so far in this system, which involves only central govt. Major obstacles are in forest land clearance, environmental clearance and a number of other clearances where positive support of both Central and State governments and other agencies is required. In the last five years, the captive miners who got the coal blocks allocated under the CMSP (Coal Mines Special Provisions) Act, have just been able to reach a production level around 55 million tonnes. These are the mines which were actually producing before cancellation of the blocks and got stopped because of cancellation.
Coal
mining disturbs land use in the mining area. Land needs to be acquired for
mining and it is considered equivalent to raw material for any other industry.
No mining is feasible without having land right in an opencast mine. For an
underground mine also having surface rights is a pre-requisite for
uninterrupted mining with caving of overlying strata of coal seams. The Land
Acquisition and Rehabilitation & Resettlement Act of 2013 has made the
process of land acquisition properly defined but made it more complex. Acceptance
of starting a mine in the area by the local population has been made mandatory
through this Act, apart from the steep compensation for land and R&R
benefits. This has been causing not only huge delays in the process of land
acquisition but also making the project unviable in many cases due to huge
capital outgo in land. Land and Rehabilitation put together constitute a major
part of the total capital investment of a coal mining project these days. This,
coupled with high stripping ratio in an opencast mine, which is generally the
case with increasing depth and poorer quality of coal seams make the project
unviable in the current pricing scenario.
Challenges specific to OC Mines
Challenges specific to OC mining can be broadly classified in three categories:
·
Environmental challenges
·
Technological challenges in maintaining pit
slope and dump stability
·
Availability of large size equipment for mass production
Environment, particularly air, water and noise, is the greatest casualty of opencast mining operation. Mining pollutes air and water due to generation of dust at different centres of mining and transportation activities. Suppression of dust at the points of generation is a major activity that often goes unattended leading the dust to get airborne. Dust generation is more prominent during blasting and loading of blasted rocks/coals in the transport equipment. Loading equipment do not make any provision for water spraying during loading operation. I had seen such an arrangement made by the colliery engineer on a large excavator cum loading machine (30m3 bucket capacity) in the UK and wanted the suppliers of loading machines in India to incorporate similar facility. But the manufacturers/suppliers had several excuses to not go for it. If, dust suppression arrangement at the point of loading is made automatic, I think, dust getting airborne in opencast mines, to a great extent, will be reduced. We need to innovate to minimize the environmental degradation due to opencast mining. Minimising noise generation at the machines is another area of concern. The loading and transport equipment should have provisions of double silencers to keep the noise level to within permissible level. Using mine water for agricultural purposes after its treatment and recycling for dust suppression is another area that needs to be adopted in every mine as a process of mining.
With increasing depths of opencast mines, pit and dump slope failures are becoming more prominent now. There have been several instances of internal and external dump failures in some of the large mines of CIL, causing loss of life and equipment. Pit slope failure or bench failure is also prominent in some steep mines. These need to be technically handled with proper pit and dump design to obviate such problems.
Mass production requires large size equipment that can handle larger volumes by individual equipment, leading to increased productivity, reduced cost and reduced environmental impact. Internationally, excavators up to 75m3 bucket size and dump trucks of 400 tonne capacity are being manufactured. In India we have not been able to produce loading machines of more than 10m3 capacity and dump trucks of 100 tonne capacity. Any equipment of size larger than these are to be imported that takes lot of time due to limited number of manufacturers participating in the tenders. International manufacturers of equipment having bases in India for manufacturing lower size equipment and the domestic manufacturers should be mandated to manufacture large size equipment, as tendered for, in India to create manufacturing capacity for larger equipment as well as availability of spares.
Challenges specific to UG Mining
Challenges specific to underground mining are numerous and can be broadly categorized under the following heads:
· Geological complexity of the coal resource.
· Access to the resources by sinking shafts.
· Non-availability of mass production equipment indigenously.
· Much higher cost of production.
· Surface subsidence
· Drastically reduced extractable reserve.
Indian coalfields are formed on Drift theory of coal deposition and have experienced extensive faulting and igneous intrusions over the geological ages. These have made the coal deposits geologically very complex with large number of faults, dykes, sills, thinning and thickening of coal seams and deposition of thick dirt bands within the coal seams. All these disturbances individually alone have the capacity to pose serious problems in underground mining of coal seams. The problem becomes more complex where more of such disturbances exist together. Geological complexity limits selection of mining technology. For any mass production technology, such disturbances are not desirable. Thus, most of the Indian coalfields are not amenable for extensive mechanization and hence, limit the choice of planning large capacity underground mines.
The choice of establishing entries to deeper deposits lies between vertical shafts and inclined drifts. With greater depths, the choice gets limited to vertical shafts, as the length of inclined drifts become very large and cost prohibitive. As over the years, new underground mines have not been established the expertise of sinking of shafts in the country has depleted. Opening of a new underground mine, therefore, requires overseas expertise in the area of shaft sinking, which is both costlier and time consuming.
For Mass Production equipment like Continuous Miner and Powered Support Longwall the mine owners have to depend on import. While the scope of Longwall mining is limited and production of such equipment may not be feasible domestically, there exists large scope of introduction of Continuous Miner in new underground mines and the equipment for this technology like Continuous Miner, Shuttle Cars, mobile Roof Bolters etc. and also other equipment like drifting machines for drivage in stone, Multi Utility Vehicles for transportation of material and debris etc. need to be manufactured indigenously for their easy and increased availability. Winders and other Hoists are also not available domestically. Indigenisation of manufacture of underground mining equipment will go a long way in increasing share of underground production from deeper deposits.
All the factors mentioned above lead to increased cost of production from underground mines. When the choice exists between OC and UG mining of any deposits, OC mining invariably wins the race on cost considerations. Most of the presently operating underground mines of CIL and SCCL run in huge losses.
Underground mining causes subsidence of surface, depending on the depth of mining and the thickness of the seams extracted. This requires the mine owners to acquire the surface rights, else the permission for depillaring or final extraction of coal seams is not granted by the statutory authority (DGMS). Hence, even for underground mining, acquisition of surface land, either on limited lease basis or as permanent acquisition becomes necessary, otherwise the land owners do not allow mining underneath. This is true with forest land also.
Total reserve that can be extracted in any underground mine depends on its geological complexity. However, even with best of the geology in Indian coalfields, the ratio of extractable reserve to the total geological resource in the area is far less compared to OC mining. The percentage extraction in underground mines does not exceed 30-35% of the geological resource in best mines. This figure goes down hugely with increased complexity of geology. The geological resource is estimated with seam thickness of 0.5m and above, while for underground mining the minimum workable thickness of coal seams is taken to be 1.5m. Hence, a lot of resource in thin seam situations get lost in underground mines.
Conclusion
No comments:
Post a Comment