Coal India to invest $25 billion in 5 years

Coal India is set to invest a whopping $20-25 billion (over Rs 1.27 lakh crore) over the next 5 years to achieve its billion tonnes target by 2020, double of what it produces now. This level of domestic production will also put an end to import of thermal coal to India, coal and power minister Piyush Goyal said.

"The 1 billion tonnes target would entail investment of anything between $20-25 billion. This would be invested over the next five years as we touch the production target. This would go in technologies, in equipment, in upgrading facilities and opening new mines," Goyal said while inaugurating the new headquarters of Coal India near Kolkata.

Arranging this fund would not be a problem considering that Coal India sits on a reserve of about Rs 70,000 crore set to swell as production grows fast.

"Coal India is a very strong company if you look at its fundamentals with an outstanding balance sheet. Raising fund wouldn't be an issue, and with the ramp up of production, you can imagine the kind of reserve Coal India would be generating."

The project involves opening 70-100 mines and reworking mining plans for some of the existing mines which would see their production going up by 4-5 times.

"We would see incremental growth in first two years and quantum jump in the last two years of the plan period," Goyal said.

But can Coal India be able to sell this amount of Coal in coming years considering that investments in new power projects, the main consumer of coal, has dried up?

While a mere 7% growth in production during FY15 at 495 million tonnes has left the power plants flush with stocks, Goyal is optimistic, saying power production would match up expected to double to two trillion units by that time.

"There are still 28 crore Indians who don't receive electricity in their homes while million litres of diesel are used to run generators. The wave of industrialisation that we see in the years ahead, India need to produce at least two trillion units of electricity in the next five years from 1 trillion units now that will obviously demand much larger quantity of coal."

As Coal India doubles its output, there would not be any need to import coal, which will progressively start falling beginning this year.

"We will see the declining trend in the current year itself and in about two to two-and-a-half years' time thermal coal import will stop though the higher calorific coal needed for steel plants may still continue to get imported."

Efforts to raise coal production has already started bearing fruit, Goyal claimed.

"The collective effort of workers helped increase production by 32 million tonnes in FY15 against cumulative 31 million tonnes over the previous four years since 2010. And in the first 43 days of FY16, till May 13, there has been 11% growth over previous year. We will surpass this in months to come and our targets would be even more ambitious."

Goyal, along with Coal India chairman Sutirtha Bhattacharya, unveiled on Friday the project Utkarsh, which is the roadmap for mission 1 billion tonnes covering online performance management system, online vigilance clearance system and document digitisation and archival systems.

The detailed mine specific plan to ramp up production would be made transparent and would be put on public domain, he said.