Government expects to achieve 1.5 billion tonne of coal output by 2022

The country is expected to achieve the coal production of 1.5 billion tonne by 2022, Coal Secretary Susheel Kumar said on Monday.

Of the 1.5 billion tonne, 1 billion tonne would be contributed by Coal India and the rest by private producers and Singareni Collieries, the official said. 

Earlier, the government had announced to achieve a coal output of 1.5 billion tonne by 2019-20. The coal ministry had set the target of 1 billion tonne by 2019-20 for state-run miner Coal India to cut imports and increase the availability of the dry fuel to bolster growth.

"We hope that by 2022 the domestic coal production should be around 1.5 billion tonnes of which about a billion tonne will be (produced by) Coal India (CIL), 0.4 billion tonnes would be (produced by) private producers...and a small portion will be done by Singareni Collieries," the secretary said.

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The world's largest coal miner Coal India accounts for over 80 percent of the domestic coal production. "This may further increase till 2030 to about close to 2 billion tonnes if we have some faith is CCU (carbon capture and utilisation) technology," he said.

India being a country which believes in international trade, not all imports can be stopped, he said, adding that but the government's endeavour is to reduce the import of thermal coal specially for inland power plants.

"When we did our modelling exercises based on which we prepared our INDCs (Intended Nationally DeterminedContributions) we found that not only up to 2022 and 2030 but beyond even beyond that is up to 2040 and 2050 coal and lignite will be our mainstay," he stressed.

Asserting that CCU is something which the government seriously looking at, the secretary said that a task force has been constituted on the same.

Stating that thermal coal imports till date are lower than last year's, Kumar said that his assessment is that overall declining trend of import will probably continue for the entire year. 

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