India: OMC Floats Tenders for Kodingamali Bauxite Mine

Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC), a state run mining entity has floated tenders to develop its Kodingamali bauxite lease.

In the first year of its operations, OMC would extract 1.5 MnT of bauxite annually from the mine. From second year onwards, production would be scaled up to 3 MnT pa.

Kodingamali mine is strategically important since it is positioned by OMC to act as feedstock of bauxite for end use industries, especially Vedanta. The London listed metals and mining conglomerate has been struggling hard to arrange bauxite to feed its starving alumina refinery at Lanjigarh in the eastern state of Odisha. With no local visible bauxite sources, the company is sourcing bauxite from neighbouring states like Chhattisgarh and also banking on imports from New Guinea.

The Odisha government had earlier announced that will make arrangements for bauxite supplies for the ailing refinery from Kodingamali mines owned by its PSU OMC. The bauxite mines of OMC are spread over an area of 428.31 hectares (ha) in Koraput and Rayagada districts.

Vedanta has been pleading for alternative bauxite mines to the state government after the Union environment ministry red flagged the Niyamgiri bauxite mining project. The ministry’s decision stemmed from a referendum in which participating local tribals unanimously nixed the mining plan in 2013.

As of now, Vedanta is completely dependent on externally sourced bauxite to run the Lanjigarh refinery with an approved capacity of 4 MnT a year. But Vedanta was hardly able to run it at its full design capacity as local bauxite supplies had dried up.

Present, nearly 70% of the bauxite requirement of the Lanjigarh refinery was met by sourcing from other states like Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Vedanta was importing the balance 30 per cent from resource rich nations like New Guinea.

As Vedanta was struggling to feed its Lanjigarh alumina refinery, the Odisha government in January this year, had struck a deal with OMC for supply of bauxite from the latter’s Kodingamali lease with 81 MnT of deposits.