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Coal India, the world’s largest coal company, opens more than 30 mines this year and starts up to five more at Greenfield locations. The country’s sector for renewable energies of the country is unable to fulfill its growing energy requirement.
“If the new position and the battery storage systems become larger, better and more efficient, the proportion of coal can decrease,” said Prasad, chairman of the state coal of India, the Financial Times in an interview.
Prasad said he was it reopening 32 Coales that are no longer available to share sales with local partners privately owned, with production in the 2025-26 financial year.
The mines were closed beforehand because they were uneconomical due to the dependence on “manual” Mining“And” small machines, “he said. In December, the Ministry of Coal in India announced that it would bring closed mines back into the line to increase production and reduce imports.
“That happens now,” said Prasad. The government had already granted tenders for 27 of these mines this year, and the remaining five goods “in the pipeline” and would soon be granted.
The greatest demand for coal in the fifth largest economy in the world is fulfilled by local production, mainly by coal India. The company has 310 mines across the country and delivers around three quarters of the national coal issue.
Despite great investments in solar and wind farms through local conglomerates such as the Tata Group, India still leans on coal for 74 percent of its electricity generation. The government predicts that the proportion will fall to 55 percent by 2030 and will fall to 27 percent by 2047.
In the past year, the investment in renewable energies in India rose to more than $ 13 billion, far almost the USD 68 billion, which was needed annually to achieve the goal of the government, to produce 500 gigawatts of electricity from green sources by 2030, according to Energy Think-Tank Ember.
Prasad said that the state miner was determined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the country to reach net carbon emissions in less than five decades.
“We will reach the top coal by 2035, then it will be flat, then it will definitely drop until 2047 and get down by 2070,” he said, explaining that a small amount of coal production would still be necessary back then.
India holds the fifth largest coal reserves in the world and the government said that fuel is still “decisive”.
The country, which is the fastest growing large economy in the world, has opposed the international pressure to move faster in order to reduce the use of the contaminated fossil fuel. India focuses on trying it become a manufacturing center.
In March, Minister of Minister G. Kishan Reddy said that India had “reached a historical milestone” in the 2024-25 financial year more than 1 billion tons of coal, whereby the expenses rose by 5 percent compared to the previous year.
Prasad predicted that only coal India would exceed the output of 1 billion tons after 781 million tons in the past year. The government expects domestic coal production to grow by 6-7 percent annually by 1.5 billion tons by 2030.
The coal -India chairman said that the country’s energy requirement of 1.4 billion people were “very high because of the growing efforts” and the efforts to combine more houses with the electrical network. In order to satisfy this demand, the company prepared to open up to five new OpenCast mines on Greenfield locations, he said.
Coal India produces most of its coal of OpenCast Mines, which is more environmentally harmful than underground mining, but Prasad insisted that it “broke down in a sustainable way”. In order to diversify from coal before 2070, the company is investing in solar and wind energy projects.
India only opened the commercial coal mining in the private sector 2018 And private conglomerates, including the mighty Adani group that now own and operate mines, but on a small scale compared to coal India.
“India has to dismantle coal for the coming decades, and coal India is the only company that can do this on a scale,” said Rohit Chandra, coal expert at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
