Vedanta restarts Lanjigarh refinery

Refinery operations resumed Thursday at 930 hours, the captive power plant was put on stream first

Vedanta Aluminium Ltd (VAL) has restarted its 1-million-tonne alumina refinery at Lanjigarh, Odisha,  after a gap of seven months. The refinery has been revived with bauxite sourced from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat and will operate at 60 per cent capacity.

Refinery operations resumed on Thursday at 9:30 am and at first, the captive power plant was put on stream. "We have started the operations of the alumina refinery. We have to run it at 60 per cent capacity and we will stabilise it gradually,” said Mukesh Kumar, president and chief operating officer. To operate at full capacity, VAL needs 300,000 tonnes of bauxite every month.

The refinery has shut since December 5 as bauxite supplies dried up. Since then, the company had been making efforts to obtain bauxite from alternative sources. Earlier, VAL had urged the state government to expedite processing of pending applications of Odisha Mining Corp Ltd (OMC), especially bauxite leases under non-forest areas.

These applications are either at PL (prospecting licence) or ML (mining lease) stages.

The small bauxite deposits where OMC has applied for ML are Maliparbat, Karnopodikonda, Ballada, Kakrimali, Hatimali and Majhingamali in Koraput district, Kisunmali in Kalahandi district and Choranimaribhata-A, Choranmaribhata-B, Siadimala-east and Siadimali-west in Rayagada district. These applications are pending at various levels.

VAL was also looking at bauxite supplies from group firm Bharat Aluminium Co’s Kawardah bauxite mines in Chhattisgarh. The mine promised 120,000 tonnes of bauxite supplies every month. But transportation of bauxite from these mines has been held up due to royalty issues on which a case is pending in the Chhattisgarh High Court.