Vedanta restarts Lanjigarh refinery operation

Vedanta Aluminium Limited (VAL) resumed operations at its alumina refinery at Lanjigarh in Odisha’s Kalahandi district on Monday, after remaining shut for 10 days due to shortage of bauxite, the main raw material to produce alumina.

While the 75 MW captive co-generating plant (CPP) of the complex has been restarted, process is on to resume the operation of the refinery at a reduced capacity.

The one-million tonne per annum refinery was shut down by the company on October 13 last due to drying up of the bauxite supply.

The company had served notice to the state government last month for closing down its plant for from December 5 next unless it is assured of steady supply of bauxite.

“The refinery has been re-started at a reduced capacity of 60 percent after we managed to arrange about 40,000 tonne of bauxite from Bharat Aluminum Company (Balco)’s Kawarrdah mines in Chhattisgarh,” Mukesh Kumar, chief operating officer (COO), VAL, told Business Standard.

VAL recently bagged a contract to lift 90,000 tonnes of bauxite from Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC) in two phases. While 45,000 tonnes bauxite is expected to reach the refinery complex in the current week, another 45,000 tonnes are likely to arrive in the first week of next month, sources said.

“With this raw material, we hope to run the plant at a reduced capacity till December 5. But we cannot say anything about the functioning of the plant after that as the states from where we are sourcing bauxite are reluctant to supply the material to a plant outside their states,” Kumar said. “We, however, are trying our best to operate the plant by arranging bauxite from outside Odisha,” he added

Set up with an investment of $800 million, VAL requires around 10,000 tonne of bauxite per day to run the refinery at full capacity. The plant has been operating at reduced capacity since its commissioning in August, 2007, due to lack of sufficient raw material.

VAL had made an agreement with the state-owned Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC) for supply of bauxite from Niyamagiri hills, just adjoining its refinery at Lanjigarh. The mining plan was thwarted by the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) which rejected the stage-II forest clearance of the Niyamgiri mines on August 24, 2010. The company has also applied for several other bauxite reserves within Odisha, but none of them has materialised so far.