Public hearing for the Lanjigarh project to begin soon

Bhubaneswar: The public hearing for the proposed Rs 6,000 crore expansion of the alumina refinery of Vedanta Aluminium Limited (VAL) at Lanjigarh will start soon.

The process is likely to be completed in about 40days time and SPCB will consider granting the company ‘the consent to establish and operationalise’ the unit after receiving the public hearing report from the district administration.

VAL plans to expand the capacity of its existing alumina refinery at Lanjigarh to 6 million tonne from 1 million tonne per annum at present, entailing an additional investment of about Rs 6000 crore. This will take the total investment of the company in the project to about Rs 10,000 crore.

Meanwhile, the company has obtained the clearance of the Union ministry of environment and forest (MoEF) for the proposed expansion. It has also submitted the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) report to the SPCB.

The State Pollution Control Board has in principle agreed to the expansion proposal following our presentation and the public hearing for the project is slated to start soon.

The company has made use of the public domain technology in the existing plant and at present, using the bauxite sourced mainly from Gujrat and Maharastra, which are inferior to the Orissa bauxite, in the refinery. Though, it has two streams in the existing refinery, each of 0.5 million tonne per annum (mtpa) capacity, this will go up to 0.8 million tonne if the local bauxite is used in the process.

Besides, the company has effected a number of process modification, which is expected to improve the per stream capacity to 1 mtpa, implying that the existing refinery can produce 2 million tonne alumina. Importantly, raising the alumina refinery capacity to 2 mtpa will not require additional power plant and processing unit and the existing 3x25 Mw captive power plants (CPPs) of VAL at Lanjigarh will be sufficient.

Company sources said, in the proposed expansion, three additional streams will be installed. The additional steams along with the de-bottlenecking will take the total refinery capacity to 5 million tonne. Once the 5 mtpa capacity is achieved, the de-bottlenecking will be taken up with the latest technology available by then to take the total alumina refining capacity to 6 million tonne per annum.

If everything goes as scheduled, the company will achieve 5 mtpa capacity of the refinery by June 2011 and 6 mtpa about two and half years from thereon.

The Lanjigarh refinery of VAL started the test operations in August 2007.