INDIA: Power companies fail to lift e-auctioned coal

50 lakh tonnes of coal offered by CIL in October remains unused.

A recent and shocking development in the Indian coal sector has brought planners and bureaucrats face-to-face with the stark policy conundrum afflicting the sector. It also brought to the fore the criticality of coal as an input for key infrastructure industries in the power, steel, sponge iron, cement and fertiliser sectors.

It all began last week when cabinet secretary Ajit Kumar Seth was chairing a high-level meeting on coal shortage. The huddle saw Coal India Ltd (CIL) revealing that power utilities failed to lift even a single tonne from the 50 lakh tonne of e-auction coal the state-owned miner offered it in October.

Such kind of a mute response from the power companies to the coal quantity specially earmarked for them on demand enabled CIL -- the world’s largest coal miner -- to emerge clean in the ongoing tussle with the power ministry over fuel shortage for power plants. The Kolkata-based company had offered the quantity in a one-of-its-kind experiment involving diversion of coal meant for spot sales to the power sector.

The ministry had accused the Maharatna of curtailing supply to power companies and selling coal on e-auction to fetch higher prices. E-auction had to be stopped for a few days to accommodate the diversion experiment which worked as a litmus test for the power sector’s offtake capacity.

“Just that power companies could not lift the offered coal proves that banning e-auction, as has been demanded, is not a solution,” a senior CIL official said on Thursday. “Coal India cannot be held responsible for the power sector’s woes on fuel crunch. We have enough coal to supply to power sector utilities, but they have failed to lift it,” he told Business Standard.

The primary reason for the subdued response by power utilities to e-auction coal is logistical difficulty. As a matter of policy, any coal quantity tied up at e-auction has to be lifted from mine heads, significantly increasing the buyer’s input cost. The cost of transporting coal through road is on an average at least five times higher than Indian Railways’ Rs 125-per-tonne-kilometer charges.

Besides, the quality of coal sold in the spot market is also a suspect, according to experts. “While e-auction coal was offered to us, we did not take part because of concerns on transportation and quality,” said a senior executive from NTPC Ltd, India’s largest power generator. The state-owned energy services provider requires over 160 million tonnes of coal by the end of this fiscal to run 36,000 Mw of its installed power capacity.

The Association of Power Producers said the e-auction offered only an ad-hoc window even as the power industry was looking for a long-term solution for coal shortage. “Also, the increased price of this coal owing to transport is not a pass through for private companies,” pointed out Ashok Khurana, director-general of the industry body. “Only when these two aspects are clear that the power industry will lift coal.”

For the record, the demand for coal in the country has grown at an annual rate exceeding 8.4 per cent over the past five years. The supply, on the other hand, has fallen grossly short of it, registering a dismal annual growth rate of 5.4 per cent during the same period. For the current financial year (2011-12), India’s coal demand is estimated at 696 mt, while a mere 554 mt is likely to be available. That leaves a gap of 142 mt -- to be met through imports.

More than 80 per cent of India’s annual 530 mt of coal production comes from CIL. The 1975-founded company sold around 10 per cent of its 431 mt production through e-auction last fiscal, while 18 per cent of its revenue came from the scheme. For, coal was sold at e-auction at a premium of a whopping 81 per cent over the notified price of Rs 900 per tonne. This compelled the buyers to opt for the costly e-auction coal, thanks to historic shortages.

Despite reporting flat production in 2010-11, the company denies any lag in output. another senior CIL official said it “isn’t the power ministry’s business” to question the company’s production. “They should only ask for supply. We are providing it,” he said. Further, “thanks to evacuation constraints, we have more than 50 mt stock at the moment. But this is prone to catching fire. Thus, increasing production beyond a point will only add to stocks.”

A majority of coal transport in the country occurs through the rail route. The coal ministry had identified two chief reasons for last month’s severe coal crunch: lack of adequate rail connectivity to major coalfields and unavailability of railway rakes. That had brought a third of the total 81 power stations with a capacity of 87,000 Mw on the brink of closure. Adding to the travails were heavy rainfall disrupting transportation and a simmering unrest in Telangana region that supplies coal in a big way.

While CIL requires 200 rakes for daily offtake, the availability is only less than 180. Of these, an average 127 rakes were used for despatch of the material to power utilities in October. The coal ministry has been trying to push rakes availability to 180 for the sector.

As for the planning commission, it has identified another major bottleneck in the movement of coal to end-users: the time taken by the Railways for building critical rail links. Four rail links were identified as critical for the evacuation of coal from CIL’s coalfields during the current Plan period. This included Tori-Shivpur rail link in North Karanpura (Jharkhand), Gopalpur-Jharsuguda (Orissa) in Ib Valley, Baroud-Bijuri in Mand-Raigadh (Chhattisgarh) and Sattupalli-Bhadrachalam link (Andhra Pradesh) in Singareni Collieries Company command area.

The commissioning of these lines was expected to enable movement of 130 mt of coal to end-users, much more than the current domestic shortage of 86 mt. However, none of the links has been commissioned so far. In fact, the Jharkhand government recently rejected forest clearance for the Tori-Shivpur link.