Work on Talcher fertiliser plant to begin in six months

Construction work on gas-based fertiliser plant at Talcher is expected to begin in six months following the green signal given recently by the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) for plant revival.

This was announced by Union minister of state for chemical and fertiliser and statistics & programme implementation Srikant Jena at a public meeting held at Talcher fertiliser plant on Monday. The minister inaugurated the site office of Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilisers (RCF).

“The Centre, keeping in view the huge demand for urea in the country and hefty subsidy given by it has decided to turn around all the eight closed fertiliser units in the country including Talcher. The Talcher plant will be gas based and will cost around Rs 8,000 crore. It will run under a joint venture company consisting of RCF, Coal India limited (CIL) and Fertiliser Corporation of India (FCI). RCF will have the controlling stake in the joint venture,” said Jena.

Jena said, the BIFR final clearance was expected by June but at the same time plans were afoot to revive Talcher plant using coal gasification technology. CIL will supply uninterrupted coal to it. The minister said the tender which was called for coal gasification will be opened in January 2013 and tenders for other things like urea plant will be invited shortly.

“Besides Talcher, the urea plants at Ramgundam and Sindri will also be revived. Coal gasification technology will be used in these plants,” he added.

He refused to give any timeline of production of urea from the new plant.

The Talcher urea plant, the only of its kind in eastern India, was set up in the late 70s and began production in 1980. However, it remained in red till 1992 when it was referred by the then government to BIFR. Finally, the NDA government in 1999, stopped budgetary support to it and closed the unit. The BIFR after hearing the case for many years ordered closure of the plant in 2002 in the absence of any revival proposal by the then government.