New Delhi, Dec 18 (PTI) The country is expected toachieve the coal production of 1.5 billion tonne by 2022, CoalSecretary Susheel Kumar said today.
Of the 1.5 billion tonne, 1 billion tonne would becontributed by Coal India and the rest by private producersand Singareni Collieries, the official said.
Earlier, the government had announced to achieve a coaloutput of 1.5 billion tonne by 2019-20.
The coal ministry had set the target of 1 billion tonneby 2019-20 for state-run miner Coal India to cut imports andincrease availability of the dry fuel to bolster growth.
"We hope that by 2022 the domestic coal production shouldbe around 1.5 billion tonnes of which about a billion tonnewill be (produced by) Coal India (CIL), 0.4 billion tonneswould be (produced by) private producers...and a small portionwill be done by Singareni Collieries," the secretary said.
The world's largest coal miner Coal India accounts forover 80 per cent of the domestic coal production.
"This may further increase till 2030 to about close to 2billion tonnes if we have some faith is CCU (carbon captureand utilisation) technology," he said.
India being a country which believes in internationaltrade, not all imports can be stopped, he said, adding thatbut the government's endeavour is to reduce the import ofthermal coal specially for inland power plants.
"When we did our modelling exercises based on which weprepared our INDCs (Intended Nationally DeterminedContributions) we found that not only up to 2022 and 2030 butbeyond even beyond that is up to 2040 and 2050 coal andlignite will be our mainstay," he stressed.
Asserting that CCU is something which the governmentseriously looking at, the secretary said that a task force hasbeen constituted on the same.
Stating that thermal coal imports till date are lowerthan last year's, Kumar said that his assessment is thatoverall declining trend of import will probably continue forthe entire year. PTI SIDMR.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.