CIL to restore mined zones

As Coal India limited(CIL) gears up for mining on a larger scale, the US mining equipment companies are keen to do business with the largest coal producer in the country.

Speaking at US Agency for International Development (USAID) workshop on energy security, Beth Payne, US consul general in Kolkata, said that US is keen to associate with CIL's efforts to work with high capacity mining equipment manufacturers from the US.

Earlier this year, the US Commerce office took a delegation of Coal India officials to Coal Prep Show in Kentucky to encourage American participation in Coal India's upcoming coal beneficiation projects.

"In November, we again plan to have a US pavilion featuring new-to-market companies at the International Mining and Machinery Exhibition here in Kolkata," Payne said.

Partha S Bhattacharyya, chairman CIL, admitted that there is a dearth of heavy mining equipment for coal mining here. The wait period from order to delivery has shot up from six months to around two years now, he added. In order to meet rising energy demands, CIL needed to go in for coal mining on a much larger scale.

"The country would add around 16000MW of power generation capacity in five years and a five per cent hike in coal production was needed. In the Eleventh Plan, the target was addition of 16,000-20,000MW of installed capacity every year," Bhattacharyya said.

Projected coal demand from CIL was estimated at 2 billion tons in 2031-32, but owing to these revised targets, demand would touch 2 billion tons 15 years ahead of that time.

Nearly 46 per cent of the country's energy requirement was met by CIL.The gap in demand-supply of both metallurgical and thermal coal was estimated to reach 181 million tons (mnt) in 2024-25.

In another significant development, CIL is now looking at reclamation and restoration work at abandoned opencast mining areas. This was a high priority area for CIL now coming only after coal mining and extraction. All large pits were now monitored by satellites, Bhattacharyya informed.

A CIL team recently visited one UK university to study restoration of mined zones and study environmental issues in such regions.

This apart, CIL subsidiary Central Mine Planning and Designing Institute (CMPDI) was using satellite based surveillance systems to monitor mining and land reclamation activities for all CIL opencast mining projects.