Team News Riveting
Raipur, May 31
National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) Limited is exploring the possibilities of laying a slurry pipeline between Nagarnar and Raipur for iron ore transportation.
The state-run miner having two of its three mechanised mines in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district is setting up a 131-km-long slurry pipeline to carry iron ore from Bailadila mines for its 3 million tonnes per annum steel plant in Nagarnar. The move is aimed to reduce dependence on railways for iron ore transportation to its plant.
“Apart from that we are also in the drawing board stage of making two more slurry pipelines; one would be from Nagarnar towards Vizag and we are also thinking about the economic sustainability of having another pipeline from Nagarnar towards Raipur,” Amitava Mukherjee, Chairman-cum-Managing Director (Additional Charge) and Director (Finance) of NMDC Limited, said in an investors’ conference call.
The slurry pipeline project between Bailadila and Nagarnar is likely to be completed by 2025. “Out of 131 kilometers, I think a pipeline for 24 kilometers have already been laid. Another 24 kilometers have been aligned for laying. Another 24 kilometers of pipes have already arrived which have not been aligned and only 24 kilometers of pipes are due to arrive,” Mukherjee said, adding that the entire system will be ready for use by 2025. The sanction cost of the slurry pipeline is around Rs 2900 crore and is going to go up to Rs 3500 crore, he added.
Talking about the track doubling project on Kothavalasa-Kirandul (KK) line, which facilitate NMDC to transport iron ore to Vizag, Mukherjee said the work was likely to be completed by the end of 2024 as updated by the railway authorities during interaction. The capacity of the line is supposed to increase from 28 million tonnes (MT) to around 40 MT.
NMDC is eyeing 46 to 50 MT of production in the current financial year after its output marginally slipped to 41.22 MT in the last fiscal.
“The capacity of the line would be substantially increased but the issue was not a line capacity. That has never been a constraint,” Mukherjee said. The issue is rakes availability, he added.
In the last quarter and especially in March, the railways were able to provide NMDC with an adequate number of rakes and as a result the dispatches and consequently the production could be maintained. “We have very limited capacity of storage because the mine at the hilltop and we store at the valley and there is always a very limited capacity of storage so naturally unless we are able to dispatch it affects our production also and that majorly is affected by the rake availability,” Mukherjee said.
Once the slurry pipeline comes in, then that will be a greater game changer, he added.
