Vedanta Aluminium Ltd. (VAL), which has set up a 0.5 million tonne aluminium smelter at Jharsuguda in Orissa, is forced to purchase alumina from traders importing the material from countries like Australia to keep its smelter in operation.
This is because the company’s alumina refinery at Lanjigarh in Kalhandi district, which is facing acute raw material problem, is not able to supply enough alumina to the Jharsuguda smelter.
In the absence of captive bauxite mines, the Lanjigarh refinery of the company was running on bauxite sources from Gujarat, Maharastra, Chhatishgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. But recently it is facing difficulties in sourcing bauxite.
As a result, the production at the Lanjigarh refinery has been curtailed drastically. While the capacity of the alumina refinery is about 3300 tonne per day, the output now is 1800-2000 tonne per day.
“We are sourcing alumina from traders like Glancore and have curtailed the production at refinery to about 1800-2000 tonne per day from the normal level of 3300 tonne per day”, Dr Mukesh Kumar, chief operation officer (COO), VAL told Business Standard.
Non-availability of alumina has compelled the company to approach the state owned National Aluminium Company Ltd (Nalco) for supply of alumina and has requested the state government to help it tide over the problem.
The company, which sourced alumina from its existing refinery at Lanjigarh, started importing alumina for the first time in November and has so far bought 50,000 tonnes. This is likely to increase to 1.5 lakh tonne by end of the current fiscal, Kumar added. Non-availability of adequate quantity of bauxite inside the country, and rise in left wing extremism disrupting the vehicular traffic in the area where the smelter is located have added to the problems of the company which is yet to start mining at Niyamgiri.
“Since 1986 not a single bauxite mining lease has been cleared and this long delay causes a lot of hardship for the industries”, Kumar said.
It may be noted, though the Sterlite Industries India Ltd (SIIL) and the Orissa Mining Corporation (OMC) of the Orissa government have formed a joint venture (JV) company named as ‘South-West Orissa Bauxite Mining Private Ltd’ for mining bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills, the leaseholder OMC is yet to obtain the stage-II clearance from the Union ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). It is also facing agitation from locals over mining in Niyamgiri.
