The Damodar Valley Corporation has set vertical and horizontal generation growth by 2030 and has now stepped forward for its third attempt at initiating coal mining in Bengal.

Its earlier two attempts were at Birbhum and Bankura.

The DVC currently has an installed generation capacity of 6,901 MW, which by 2030 is scheduled to scale up to 16,000 MW, which would lead to 144 million tonnes of coal consumption annually.

According to a thumb rule prescribed by the Central Electricity Authority, for every 1,000 MW generation, a thermal power plant require 9,000 tonnes of coal per day. Coal India claimed about assured 100 per cent supply to DVC plants, the DVC top officials complained about at least 4 per cent loss of coal annually due to undesired stone and earth presence mixture.

For its power units in the pipeline, like the 1320 MW Raghunathpur (Phase-II), Purulia, 800 MW Durgapur and 1600 Koderma in Jharkhand, all likely to assume generation by 2028-29, DVC has been heavily depending either on linkage coal, under power ministry’s Shakti B (i) scheme or new allocations. The scheduled time frame for linkage for those plants would expire by 2034, the ministry sources said.

Chairman of DVC, S Suresh Kumar, accompanied by member (technical), M Raghu Ram and Niladri Roy, director (technical), Eastern Coalfields Limited inspected Babuisole. The DVC chairman said, “The area has become a non-Coal India land after the ECL abandoned mining activities. We’ve made an extensive inspection of the area today and now we need to place a proposal to the coal ministry for consideration and allocation. We need to accumulate geological data of the proposed site and also estimate the exact volume of coal reserve there, besides, the depth of the possible working seams.”

Raghu Ram said, “What we are told by ECL that the area has around 100 million tonnes of reserve.” The area isn’t virgin as the ECL used to run its Ghanashyam colliery, which was abandoned due to consecutive operating loss per tonne of production 15 years back.

Earlier, in 2022, the DVC had to pull out of the proposed Khagra-Joydev captive coal block project in Dubrajpur, Birbhum. Despite chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s assurance of settling the land premium (compensation) issue, the Eastern India power major had vacated 4,100 acres of greenfield Birbhum venture as 3500 acres remained yet to be acquired at a time when a per acre revised land premium, worth Rs 35 lakh was formulated. The Centre’s deadline for the project ended on 9 August, 2022. The DVC was awarded the coal block for captive mining for two thermal power units of 500 MW each from the Mejia plant – the largest thermal power utility in Eastern India in 2015. The DVC had created a MDO (mine developer and operator), a special purpose vehicle when it could hardly possess 600 acres of hassle free state government land.

The DVC on 16 February inked a Rs 588cr agreement with Rural Electrification Corporation, a Maharatna CPSU for term loan and also aiming to strengthen development of tubed coalmine.