Vedanta sources bauxite to re-start refinery in Odisha

Vedanta Aluminium Ltd (VAL) Tuesday said it has received about 35,000 tonnes of bauxite from Gujarat to re-start its alumina refinery in Odisha's Kalahandi district at lower capacity.

"We have started getting bauxite from Gujarat. We will build a buffer stock of at least one and half lakh tones of bauxite to re-open the refinery," a senior company official told IANS.

Another shipment of the same quantity from Gujarat is also likely to reach within the next 10 days, he said.

The company had shutdown the one-million-tonne per annum alumina refinery at Lanjigarh, about 500 km from here, Dec 5 due to shortage of bauxite, the key raw material used to produce alumina.

VAL requires three lakh tonnes of bauxite per month to run the refinery at full capacity.

The official said the company is planning to re-start the plant at 60 percent capacity this week as it expects to get a regular flow of bauxite from Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Gujarat.

Vedanta wants to mine bauxite from Niyamgiri Hills near its refinery but its clearances are mired in litigation.

It has also applied for several other bauxite reserves in the state, but none of them have materialised so far. It has been trying to run the plant by buying bauxite from different states.

VAL is an associate company of the London listed Vedanta Resources Plc.