Hindalco to invest Rs 25,700 cr more

The Aditya Birla Group’s Hindalco Industries will be making an additional investment, equal to the $5-billion (Rs 25,700 crore) capex under way, to more than double its aluminium production capacity by 2016, D Bhattacharya, managing director, said here on Tuesday.

He said the pace of the expansion would largely depend on early clearances for captive coal blocks, as smelter projects are not viable without captive power.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the sixth international conference and exhibition on aluminium (INCAL 2011), organised by the Aluminium Association of India for which he is the honorary president, Bhattacharya said Hindalco’s new 360,000-tonne project would start production in the next three to five weeks.

The company is still awaiting forest clearances for the captive coal block intended to meet this project’s requirement and will be buying coal till such time as the captive coal becomes available, he said.

Hindalco already operates aluminium plants with a 500,000-tonne capacity. It expects to reach 1.5 million tonnes once it completes the ongoing expansion projects, in the near term. It is partly reusing the plant and machinery of Novelis’ UK plant that had been mothballed. He said the investment required for the capacity expansion was in the range of Rs 1,53,000 per tonne, one of the lowest in India. If natural resources were not made available to industry in time, the growing consumption meant dependence on imports, he said.

“For example, we have copper reserves sufficient for the next 200 years, but we import. That is the irony,” he said.

On these and like issues faced by the aluminum industry, such as delay in coal and bauxite ore clearances and Chinese dumping of goods, Bhattacharya said it was for the government to address all this.