Talcher urea plant to be revived in three years

FCI inks pacts with CIL, GAIL and RCF

The Fertilizer Corporation of India (FCI) today inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with three other Central PSUs — Coal India Ltd (CIL), GAIL India Ltd and Rashtriya Chemicals & Fertilizers Ltd to revive the shut urea plant at Talcher at an estimated investment of Rs 8,000 crore.

The FCI plant at Talcher whose closure was ordered by the Board for Industrial & Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in 2002, is expected to be revived in three years. The Union Cabinet had approved the revival plan in April 2007.

The MoU was signed in the presence of Union minister for petroleum & natural gas Veerapa Moily, coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal and Union minister of state for chemicals & fertilizers and statistics & programme implementation Srikant Jena.

“Today is a historic day for the country, particularly for the people of Odisha. The Talcher fertilizer unit is being revived by a consortium of FCI, CIL, GAIL and RCF at an estimated cost of Rs 8,000 crore. It is a unique project being set up on coal gasification for production of 1.2 million tonne per annum (mtpa) of urea and ammonium nitrate. CIL would supply around five million tonne of coal annually for this project,” said Jena.

It has been decided to form two separate joint venture (JV) companies for the revival. The first JV would build upstream coal gasification and gas purification facilities with GAIL holding the majority stake. The other JV would take up construction of downstream urea cum ammonium nitrate complex and off site projects like power plant and coal washery. In the second JV, RCF and CIL would have majority stakes while minority stakes will be held by the other two PSUs- FCI and GAIL.

A four-member Central team headed by the additional general manager of Project India Development Limited A K Sinha visited the Talcher plant last Tuesday and took stock of the condition of machinery, technical facilities, production capacity and surroundings.