KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – Coal India Limited (CIL) will invest capital expenditure (capex) of around $1.3-billion during 2017/18, Coal Minister Piyush Goyal has said.
He noted that the yearly capex budget was in the final stages and that CIL had taken all measures to ensure that all funds earmarked for capex were used during the year, without any spillover.
As per official record, CIL’s capex for the current financial year would be an estimated $1.19-billion. This is besides the $780-million set aside for special projects including transportation infrastructure and CIL's planned foray into thermal power generation.
Even the marginal rise in capex for the coming fiscal year is significant since the miner is expected to close the current financial year, ending March, with 2.5% growth in production growth 2% growth in sales.
The production growth for the current year was lower than the 8.5% achieved in 2015/16.
CIL officials have attributed the lower production growth to mounting stocks estimated at 100-million tonnes at both mine pitheads and with thermal power plants which had forced the miner to slow down production at key large mines.
The Coal Ministry, at start of the fiscal year, had set a production growth target of 11% for CIL based on the 8.5% achieved in the previous year.
Although figures for the year were still to be collated, data released earlier showed that the miner produced 488-million tonnes during April 2016 to February 2017, which was lower than the 535-million tonnes target set for the same period by the Coal Ministry.
For 2016/17, the target is 598-million tonnes, requiring production growth of 11%.