The Hindu Business Line : Nalco set to acquire 241 wagons

Wagon plans
With this acquisition, Nalco’s wagon fleet size will rise to 894.

The delivery of wagons will coincide with Nalco’s second phase expansion.

Santanu Sanyal

Kolkata, July 2 National Aluminium Company Ltd (Nalco), the Orissa-based public sector aluminium giant, is to acquire 241 BTAP wagons, the specialised wagons used for transportation of alumina, at an estimated cost of Rs 83 crore.

The orders have been placed with Bharat Bhari Udyog Nigam Ltd (BBUNL) and accordingly Burn Standard will manufacture 141 of them and Braithwaite the balance 100. The delivery, to be made in phases, should start from December 2008 to coincide with the completion of Nalco’s second phase expansion currently in progress at an estimated cost of Rs 5,100 crore. With this acquisition, Nalco’s wagon fleet size will rise to 894. Nalco currently has a fleet of 653 BTAP wagons deployed for transportation of alumina in two directions from its Damonjodi refinery – one to Visakhapatnam port for exports and the other to Angul, near Cuttack, the location of the company’s smelters, for captive consumption.

A total of 13 rakes each comprising 48 wagons of 55-tonne capacity are generally used for transportation of alumina. Of the balance 29 wagons, some are kept for maintenance and some others as standby in case some wagons fall sick.

Of the 13 rakes in operation, six are deployed on the Damonjodi-Vizag route and the seven others on the Damonjodi-Angul route, with the average turnaround time of each rake travelling to Vizag port being five to six days and to Angul 9 to 10 days.

The present wagon acquisition plan is aimed at meeting the projected increase in the demand for rakes for handling increased volumes of both exports and captive consumption. On completion of the second phase expansion, the alumina production will rise to 2.1 mt and 56 per cent of it will be exported while the balance will be used for captive consumption. Right now around 54 per cent of the present alumina production of 1.57 mt is exported, leaving 46 per cent for captive consumption.

On the other hand, the domestic transportation of metals, the output of Nalco’s smelters, is undertaken almost entirely by road. An estimated 2.63 lakh tonnes of metals, representing 76 per cent of the present metal production of 3.45 lakh tonnes, is used for domestic consumption and almost the entire quantity is transported out of the Angul plant by road. “It is ex-factory sale, i.e., the buyers place vehicles at the plant to lift the product,” a spokesman for Nalco told Business Line in Bhubaneswar recently. Only limited quantities of metals were sent by rail to the company’s stock yards in Kolkata and Visakhapatnam, he said. The company has six other stockyards in different parts of the country, but all served by road, he added.

Limited quantities of metals (82,000 tonnes in 2006-07, roughly 24 per cent of the total production) are exported through the ports Kolkata, Paradip and Visakhapatnam and the entire volume, as it was pointed out, is transported to these ports by rail.

From December 2008, the metal production will rise to 4.6 lakh tonnes but, as the spokesman indicated, the distribution between domestic sale and the exports would be most probably maintained at the current level of about 75-25 per cent.

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