MCL floats e-tender for 10 MTY Jagannath Coal Washery in Odisha

Odisha Sun Times Bureau
Sambalpur, Jun 15:

The most innovative and quality conscious subsidiary of Coal India, Mahanadi  Coalfields Limited (MCL)  floated its second e-tender for setting-up a 10 MTY capacity Jagannath Coal Washery at Talcher Coalfield in Odisha’s Angul district on Monday.

The e-tender for company’s Jagannath Washery was formally floated by JP Singh, Director  (Technical/P&P) of MCL at the corporate office here in the presence of senior officers.

MCL had added a new feather to its cap when AN Sahay, CMD, formally floated first e-tender in the  country for a coal washery, named Ib-Valley Washery of 10 million tonne annual capacity, on May 29 this year.

The company had produced over 121 million tonne coal during the last fiscal ended March 31, 2015, and plans for producing 250 million tonne coal in financial year 2019-20, thus sharing 25 per cent of Coal India’s  One Billion coal production target.

As per gazette notification of MOEF&CC, TPPs located beyond 750 km and 500 km from pit head are prohibited to use coal of more than 34% ash with effect from January 1, 2015 to June 5, 2016 respectively.

MOEF & CC has further indicated to amend the gazette notification by eliminating the provision of distance of TPPs from pit head and so, every gram of coal will have to be beneficiated prior to its supply and use in TPPs irrespective of its distance.

In light of gazette notification, Coal India decided to setup number of washeries in its first phase and MCL was entrusted to set up four washeries of 10 MTY capacity each.

In MCL, ash percentage of coal is generally having more than 40 percent. These coals will require beneficiation prior to supply and use in TPPs. These coal washeries are to be set-up under Build Operate Maintain (BOM) concept where a bidder has the freedom to choose the state-of-art-technology for use, keeping in mind the set-up cost, washing charge, water and power consumption and impact of yield percentage.

Under this concept, operator will have to set up and operate the plant at least for 10 years. In conventional tendering manual tendering under BOM concept, about 16 months period is required to finalize the bid and signing of contact.

A washery, after the signing of contract, would be made functional within 18 months. Almost three years is required to start the commercial operation of the plant from publishing of bid.

MCL has innovated in-house system of tendering through electronic mode which eliminates human interference and ensures transparency while the evaluation is done by a system-generated process to decide the successful bidder.

A team of engineers of washery department, e-procurement cell headed by general manager, (washery), PK Mishra has developed the module of e-bidding with CMPDI.

In contrast to the manual tendering process, which takes on an average one and half year to decide the successful bidder, decisions through e-tendering are arrived at quickly as financial evaluation is computed by an in built pre-defined business logic using long range marginal cost and discounted cash flow method. By adopting e-bidding, about a year time can be saved in finalizing lowest bidder.

Since the documents required to be submitted through manual tendering for such big projects run into 400 pages or more, the e-tendering mode offers a win-win situation to the coal company(MCL) as well as the tenderer and also reduces use of paper.

MCL had earlier finalised the tenders for two coal washeries through manual tendering at Hingula in December 2013 and at Basundhara in May 2014 which are awaiting EC Clearance. In the second phase, the MCL plans tendering for three more washeries -- 20 MTY on turnkey basis at Lakhanpur, 40 MTY at Siarmal and another 20 MTY at Gopaljee Kaniha – to achieve a total coal washing capacity of 120 MTY.