The Utkal Alumina International Limited (UAIL), a subsidiary of Hindalco Industries, hopes to start production from its 1.5 million tonne alumina refinery, being set up at a cost of Rs 7,000 crore near Kasipur in Orissa’s Rayagada district, in the second quarter of next year.
Simultaneously, the company intends to take up work for expansion of the project which will increase the refinery capacity from 1.5 million tonne to 3 million tonne of alumina per annum.
Since there is no environment issue pertaining to mining of bauxite for the plant and the expansion project, the work will be completed on schedule, said the company sources.
Unlike the mining of bauxite at Niyamgiri for Vedanta’s refinery project at Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district which was shot down by Union Ministry of Forest and Environment (MoEF), UAIL has recently received the approval of MoEF for its expansion plan. The company had earlier got clearance for mining of 8.5 million tonnes of bauxite per annum at Baphilimali and Kodingamali in Rayagada and Kalahandi districts. The bauxite reserve in these two mines is estimated around 200 million tones
UAIL initially planned to mine 4.5 million tonnes of bauxite annually to feed its 1.5 million tonne refinery. This will be stepped up to 8.5 million tonne bauxite per annum once the expansion project is completed. “Since there is no hurdle for bauxite mining, we hope to start production from the next year”, a senior company official told Business Standard.
It may be noted, the UAIL project is delayed by about 18 years due to the protest of the project affected people (PAP) and the environmentalists.
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However, all the issues have been resolved and the construction work is now going on in full-swing, said the official.
The company proposed to send alumina produced from this plant to two smelters at Rengali in Orissa and Mahana in Madhya Pradesh, which are currently under construction by Hindalco. “Both the aluminium smelters are now under construction and likely to go on stream in the second quarter of 2012”, said the company official.
UAIL project was conceived in 1992 to tap huge deposit of bauxite in Rayagada region and produce alumina.
But worried over the delay in implementation of the refinery unit, two original joint venture partners; Tata Sons and Norsk Hydro had pulled out of the project earlier while another foreign partner, Alcan, had sold its stake to Hindalco in 2007.