Hyderabad, May 3 (RAHNUMA): The Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) has received a major boost as the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), Government of India, has recently agreed to grant preliminary environmental clearance for the innovative Ramagundam coal mine project for which SCCL had been awaiting approval for a long time.
The SCCL management received official communication from the Ministry on Friday, and the formal clearance documents are expected within the next 10 days.
The successful clearance is the result of the efforts made under the guidance of SCCL chairman and managing director Dr. Buddhaprakash Jyoti, along with the dedicated work of directors and officials.
The SCCL management expressed happiness over receiving preliminary environmental clearance for this innovative project, which has been designed with the highest-ever annual coal production capacity in SCCL’s history — 21 million tonnes per annum.
The project has been formulated to compensate for production loss from depleting old mines and to extract 314.98 million tonnes of recoverable coal reserves located within the limits of two opencast mines and three underground mines that already possess basic approvals.
The coal produced from this project will primarily be supplied to NTPC Ramagundam and other coal-based industries under fuel supply agreements.
The project aims to completely recover the remaining coal reserves in the closed GDK-10 Incline Mine and the soon-to-be-closed Vakilpalli Underground Mine by converting them into opencast mines. Along with this, SCCL has integrated the remaining coal reserves. All these mining areas have been combined into one integrated and unique project named the Ramagundam coal mine project.
The project has been designed to utilise the existing approvals efficiently and produce coal with minimum additional investment and without causing environmental disturbance.
Besides compensating for the declining production from old mines, this project is expected to extend the operational life of the Ramagundam region by another 25 years.
Generally, even after underground mining operations are completed, some coal reserves remain unextracted within the mine. In order to utilise these valuable natural coal resources instead of leaving them abandoned, SCCL has previously converted closed underground mine areas into opencast mines and successfully extracted coal.
To facilitate mining in all five mine areas, SCCL decided to obtain certain additional clearances over and above the existing approvals, thereby shaping the project into a new integrated venture under the name Ramagundam coal mine.
