India’s only copper ore producer, Hindustan Copper Ltd (HCL) is adopting a multi-pronged strategy to achieve its ambitious production target of 20 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) by 2024.

“Construction of new mines, reopening the closed ones and expansion of existing mines is the three-pronged strategy that we are currently working on to achieve our production target,” said Santosh Sharma, Chairman and Managing Director, Hindustan Copper.

The company will reopen its closed mine in Rakha (Jharkhand) and expand existing mines in Khetri Copper Complex (KCC) in Rajasthan and Malanjkhand Copper project (MCP) in Madhya Pradesh besides exploring new mines in the leasehold land available with it.

The company, which currently produces 3.8 mpta, will ramp up the production capacity of its Malanjkhand copper mine, which contributes 60 per cent of the company’s revenue and also the largest copper mine in India with 200 million tonnes copper ore deposit.

“We are going to take up copper exploration in Malanjkhand in a very big way” Sharma said.  The company has invested around ₹1178 crore on underground mine construction and development in Malanjkhand which currently produces about 2.5 mtpa copper through open pit mining and will begin production from underground mine from September 2019.

“We are gradually moving towards underground mining and will shut open pit mining in another 4 years as it has become unviable to operate,” Sharma said.   The company has projected to increase its output to 4.1 mtpa by March this year, 5.1 mtpa by 2019-20 and reach 6.1 mtpa by 2020-21.

“We have targeted to produce 20 mtpa of copper ore by 2024 out of which Malanjkhand will contribute about 8 mtpa,” Sharma said.

Sharma also said that the company is not looking at significantly expanding smelting capacity since India already has about 10 lakh tonnes of smelting capacity which is far in excess of the requirement.  “Smelting is high volume low margin business whereas mining is low volume high margin business and our focus will be only on mining,” Sharma added.

Sharma also added that the company has recently received permission from NITI Aayog to explore strategic minerals like cobalt, lithium, tungsten and nickel.

“We have entered a three-way Joint venture National Aluminium Company (NALCO) and Mineral Exploration Corporation Limited (MECL) for extraction of strategic minerals,” said Sharma.

Nalco will have 34 per cent share while HCL and MECL will have 33 per cent share each in the joint venture.

The company also expects to generate 313 kg of gold and 3130 kg of silver annually from its Copper Ore Tail (COT) mineral recovery once the capacity of the newly built recovery plant reaches 3.29 million tonnes annually.

(This correspondent was at Raipur at the invitation of the company).

 

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