NALCO to Raise its Aluminium Production

NEW DELHI (Scrap Monster): Facing a huge demand recovery, National aluminium Company Ltd (NALCO) has decided to increase their aluminium production. The company had restarted its 10 aluminium production pots early this week at its Angul smelter located in Odisha.

The company had reduced its aluminium outturn last fiscal due to the sluggish aluminium market, lack of coal availability and LME realization. It had closed 329 out of 960 pots or capacity of about 4.6 lakh tonnes per year of its plant. Now it restarted some of its pots and bout 641 pots are now working. The company’s one pot has the capacity to produce about 1.37 tonnes per day.

Recent LME aluminium prices, the premiums over LME prices for domestic and export market sale and weal rupee against dollar has made the company incentives to take the decision to surge the metal production. At the same time, the company expects to complete its 4-channel 25 km and Rs 190-crore fly ash slurry project functional by December 2014.

The slurry project deals with the carrying of ash from NALCO’s captive power smelter at Angul to Mahanadi Coalfield’s Bharatpur mines in Odisha. The slurry ash then can be used to fill the non-operational mine pits. The execution of the project may finish the work of laying the first channel by 2014 September.