Coal shortage hits NALCO alumina production

Bhubaneswar: Shortage of coal has forced the National Aluminium (NALCO) to cut down alumina production at its plant in Orissa's Koraput district by about 10 percent, officials said Friday. "Due to erratic supply of coal, our production of alumina is only 80-90 percent of the capacity of the refinery at Damanjodi," Nalco chairman C.R. Pradhan told IANS. "The production has been suffering since Sep 4 because of the shortage of coal. The daily production has fallen by 10-15 percent," another company official said. "Due to erratic supply of coal, we have lost about 18,000 tones of alumina in the past two to three months," he added. The company also said it had scaled down power generation by 50 MW at its smelter in Angul due to coal shortage. "Normally we need to have at least six power units fully operational to produce 720 MW of power to meet our requirements. But coal shortage has forced us to go for partial load operation in the sixth unit since the past few days," said Arun Sharma, executive director of the Angul unit. "At present, the coal stock we have can last for only one or two days," Sharma said, adding the smelter operation has so far not been affected as the reduced generation has been compensated by purchasing power from the state power grid. Coal shortage has been affecting alumina production at Nalco, India's second largest aluminium producer, for the past few months. In July, two of the three boilers at the Damanjodi refinery were shut down for about three days. In June, Nalco was forced to shut down one of the seven power units that feed its smelter at Angul due to lack of coal.