Jindal's Orissa CTL project to avoid fertile land

Jindal Steel and Power (JSPL) will not acquire fertile and irrigated land for its proposed Rs 45,000 crore Coal to Liquid (CTL) near Angul in Orissa, according to Rajesh Jha, executive director of the company.

The company needs about 4000 acres of land for the project and most of it will be acquired from a wasteland patch. The company, meanwhile, has identified three sites near Angul for the project and character of the land and its proximity to the coal mines will bear lot of weightage in final selection of the site.

CTL project, which will be set up under the banner of Jindal Synfuels limited (JSFL), will have an overall capacity to produce 80,000 barrels per day (bpd) equivalent of key oil products such as Diesel, Naphtha, and LPG from coal. The project will provide direct and indirect employment to 32,000 persons.

Jha said, the project will adopt state-of-the technologies to make it environment friendly and free of pollution hazards. The scope of the project, which will start production by 2016-17, also includes a 1100 Mw power plant.

Jha allayed fears on the pollution hazards due to emission of carbon di-oxide, sulphur and other effluents from the CTL plant.

Explaining the logic behind setting up to the project, he said, “The world will face acute shortage of petroleum products and in this backdrop, the use of coal to produce diesel is a viable alterative option."

Dispelling fears of pollutions raised by some quarters, the chief of the project, Debananda Tripathy explained details of the project and how the diesel and naptha will be made from coal gasification using environment friendly technologies. He also assured that the polluting emission will be very minimum and less than the conventional diesel processing.

Senior JSPL officials, Prashant Hota, S.K. Sharma, Amit Upadhyaya and Prasanta Dehury were present.