Hindustan Copper Ltd., the country’s lone copper mining company, will shortly float global tenders for two mines in Jharkhand with a total ore capacity of 3 million tonnes, said its CMD Santosh Sharma.
Located in eastern India’s Singhbhum copper belt, this includes the brownfield Rakha mine and the greenfield Chapri-Siddeshwar mine. These underground mines would be outsourced and it would take about four years for them to develop and come into full-fledged production. Rakha was closed in 1999 due to unviable operations. Technology advancements since then have improved viability.
They would form part of the HCL’s plans to boost its annual ore capacity to 12.4 million tonnes from 3.4 million tonnes now by 2021-22. This would boost HCL’s copper production capacity from 35,000 tonnes now to 1.2 lakh tonnes by 2022. The total project cost would be around ₹5,000 crore.HCL’s five copper mining leases are located in Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.It has processing units in Taloja in Madhya Pradesh and in Gujarat. It manufactures copper cathodes, continuous cast wire rods and by products containing gold, silver and selenium.
Government stake in the profitable PSU stands at 76 % . Mr Sharma said that the outlook was bright for an integrated copper company like HCL at a time when copper prices were on an upswing globally.
