Coal India, the world’s biggest coal miner, moved ahead on Wednesday with plans to acquire mines abroad by beginning the process of forming a subsidiary in South Africa.<\/p>\n
The development follows state-run Coal India Ltd (CIL) signing a pact with the Limpopo province of South Africa to identify and develop coal mines as the Indian company grapples with an acute coal shortage.<\/p>\n
The public sector firm invited bids for appointing consultants to help it form a wholly-owned subsidiary in Africa, the semi-official news agency Press Trust of India said.<\/p>\n
“Coal India intends to select South Africa based consultant(s) to assist its venture of formation of a wholly-owned subsidiary company,” CIL said in the bids document, according to the news agency.<\/p>\n
The step comes as India recovers from last week’s massive power outage — the worst in the history of the country, which runs a peak-hour electricity shortfall of around 12 percent.<\/p>\n
Last year, the government of Limpopo, the northern province of South Africa, approached Coal India to set up a joint venture.<\/p>\n
Coal India has earmarked 60 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) for acquisition of mines overseas in this financial year from its cash reserves of nearly $11 billion.<\/p>\n
CIL, which accounts for more than 80 per cent of domestic coal production, missed its revised 2011-12 production target. It achieved only 435.84 metric tonnes as against the targeted 447 metric tonnes.<\/p>\n
The demand-supply gap for coal was 161.5 million tonnes in the last fiscal year to March 2012 and it is expected to be around 114 million tonnes this year.<\/p>\n
CIL has agreed to a government demand that it sign fuel supply agreements to meet a minimum of 80 percent of the needs of some 48 new power projects.<\/p>\n
The company will have to pay penalties to electric utilities in the event of a shortfall in supply.<\/p>\n
It wants to improve coal availability both by increasing domestic production and also through overseas sources.<\/p>\n
Coal India produces more than 80 percent of India’s coal at close to 500 mines across eight states.<\/p>\n
It holds the largest extractable coal reserves in the world, with over 22 billion tonnes, but has struggled to boost output due to failure to get environment and regulatory clearances.<\/p>\n
Coal accounts for more than half of India’s energy use and consumption is set to increase as development accelerates in energy-intensive sectors such as steel and cement manufacturing.<\/p>\n
India has been adding power station capacity to meet its needs, but some plants are idle because of fuel shortages.<\/p>\n
The government sold off a 10 percent stake in Kolkata-based Coal India in 2010, raking in $3.4 billion. – SAPA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Coal India, the world’s biggest coal miner, moved ahead on Wednesday with plans to acquire mines abroad by beginning the process of forming a subsidiary in South Africa. The development follows state-run Coal India Ltd (CIL) signing a pact with the Limpopo province of South Africa to identify and develop coal mines as the Indian … Continue reading “Coal India to acquire South African coal assets”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[729,730,731,12250],"class_list":["post-1021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-coal-india","tag-coal-mines","tag-fuel-shortages","tag-south-africa"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1021"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1023,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}