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Kolkata, Dec. 2 As part of its renewed focus on underground mining, Coal India has re-introduced long wall mining technology at the coking coal mine at Moonidih under CIL subsidiary Bharat Coking Coal Ltd. BCCL has already awarded a Rs 436-crore contract to Zhengzhou of China in this regard.

The contract includes Rs 130 crore for the long wall power support equipment and Rs 306 crore for operation, maintenance and after sales support for five years with penalty/bonus clause on assured production of 0.7 million tonne a year.

The introduction of technology is expected to bring down the cost of production at the loss making Moonidih from Rs 3,200 a tonne to Rs 1,015 a tonne. At the current price of Rs 1,720 a tonne for raw coking coal, CIL therefore will recover the cost of the technology in two years.

“We have not achieved much success in introducing long wall technology in the past. This was partly due to our lack of attention on underground mining. As part of our attempt to reverse the trend and increase the share of underground production, we are introducing this technology. The contract is designed in a manner so that the contractor is made accountable for the success of the technology,” CIL Chairman, Mr Partha S. Bhattacharyya, told newspersons here on Tuesday.

The share of underground production in CIL’s total production has witnessed a steady fall for last three decades. From 65 million tonne (mt) in 1975, underground production was 43.2 mt in 2006-07.

The declining trend was arrested in 2007-08 with an underground production of 43.4 mt. The total production of the company during the year was 380 mt.

“In 2008-09 we are expecting to reverse the trend by registering 1 mt increase in production from underground mines,” the CIL Chairman said.

Zhengzhou has a world scale mining equipment manufacturing facility in China and has already submitted EoI for development, operation and maintenance of high CIL capacity underground mines. “This is the first time we are selling longwall equipment in India,” Mr Jiao Chenyao, Chairman of the company, said.

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