SAIL to notch highest ever iron-ore production

03 Apr 2017

Producer Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) is poised to close the current fiscal on Friday posting its highest ever production from its captive iron-ore mines at 19.2-million tonnes.

The rising iron-ore production was in line with SAIL’s increase in hot metal production and bulk of the incremental production of the raw material was contributed to a new mine that was opened up during the year at its captive iron-ore block at Taldih, in the eastern Indian province of Odisha.

Over the next year the Taldih mines would be fully mechanised and production was expected to be ramped up to 4.2-million tonnes a year.

Meanwhile, the country’s largest steel producer has taken up a project to develop minor iron-ore reserves to act as a ‘bridge supplies’ until major projects were complete to ensure uninterrupted raw material supplies to its key steel mills.

It has started work with development of Dulki, a minor reserve as interim raw material source to its Bhilai steel plant (BSP), located in Chhattisgarh province. The reserves from Dulki mine was very small and would be just sufficient to feed BSP for just about a year-and-a-half.

But the development of the minor iron-ore reserve had become an imperative and BSP’s existing linked iron-ore mine, Dalli Rajhara also located at Chhattisgarh was fast depleting.

Furthermore, the development of the Rowghat mine with estimated reserve of 511-million tonnes, which will also be linked to BSP, was running behind schedule and would not commence production within another two years.

BSP produces 4.3-million tonnes a year of hot metal and plans to ramp it up to 7.5-million tonnes a year based on raw material supplies once the Rowghat mines was made operational.

Source – miningweekly.com