India’s domestic aluminium smelters receive lowest coal rakes since September, pushing the country more to imports

India’s domestic coal supply to aluminium smelters record further decline with railway rakes supplying coal at the lowest rate since September, while the energy crisis appeared at its peak. This, as a consequence, has compelled the country’s aluminium industry to import more amid rising cost pressures.

Data provided by Coal and Mines Minister Pralhad Joshi to Parliament shows the aluminium industry received an average of 18.4 coal-laden carriages a day in the first half of March as against 17.8 rakes in September.

Aluminium smelters in India are suffering from lower coal supply while also reeling under surging oil and gas prices. The tighter coal supply is mainly because State-run monopoly Coal India Limited is diverting more supplies to power plants to avoid power shortages like last year.

Aluminium smelting is a continuous process industry, and therefore, an outage in power supply can cause the molten metal in the potline to become solid, resulting in months of shutdowns. Hence, the Aluminium Association of India has been seeking government intervention to normalise the situation by keeping aside 25-30 coal rakes a day for the industry.

However, a couple of days ago, minister Joshi noted that the domestic coal crisis that had plagued the country for the past seven months has eased now to the extent of having 10 days inventories available at the state-run National Aluminium Co. and improved supplies from 3-4 days in September’21 to the present 9-10 days level at BALCO.

As per a report, Coal India has supplied 112 million tonnes of coal in 11 months till February to the non-power sector compared to 116.4 million tonnes during the same period last year. But that came at a high cost as customers had to pay Coal India an average premium of more than 340% above baseline prices in twos sales this month.an average premium of more than 340% above baseline prices in twos sales this month.