SCCL’s Ramagundam coal mine project gets environmental clearance

The Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) has received preliminary environmental clearance from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change for its ambitious Ramagundam Coal Mine Project. Coal output will primarily supply NTPC Ramagundam and other industries, marking a milestone in SCCL’s history.

Peddapalli: The Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) has received a major boost as the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) has recently agreed to grant preliminary environmental clearance for the innovative Ramagundam Coal Mine Project, for which SCCL had been awaiting approval for a long time.

In this regard, SCCL management received official communication from the Ministry on Friday, and the formal clearance documents are expected within the next 10 days.

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The successful clearance is the result of the efforts made under the guidance of SCCL Chairman and Managing Director Dr Buddhaprakash Jyoti, along with the dedicated work of directors and officials.

SCCL management expressed happiness over receiving preliminary environmental clearance for this innovative project, which has been designed with the highest-ever annual coal production capacity in SCCL’s history — 21 million tonnes per annum.

The project has been formulated to compensate for production loss from depleting old mines and to extract 314.98 million tonnes of recoverable coal reserves located within the limits of two opencast mines and three underground mines that already possess basic approvals.

The coal produced from this project will primarily be supplied to NTPC Ramagundam and other coal-based industries under fuel supply agreements.

The project aims to completely recover the remaining coal reserves in the closed GDK-10 incline mine and the soon-to-be closed Vakilpalli underground mine by converting them into opencast mines.

Along with this, SCCL has integrated the remaining coal reserves located in the boundary areas of Ramagundam opencast project-1 expansion phase-II, Ramagundam OCP-2 expansion and Adriyala shaft underground expansion project

All these mining areas have been combined into one integrated and unique project named the Ramagundam Coal Mine Project.

The project has been designed to utilise the existing approvals efficiently and produce coal with minimum additional investment and without causing environmental disturbance.

Besides compensating for the declining production from old mines, this project is expected to extend the operational life of the Ramagundam Region by another 25 years.