Tenth round of commercial coal block auction to kick off next week

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

ministry on Friday said it will launch the 10th round of commercial coal block auctions next week with about 62 mines to be offered without end user restrictions.
Coal produced from the 62 blocks is permitted to be sold by the companies in the free market.

So far, nine rounds of commercial coal auctions have taken place since 2020 and 107 coal blocks have been auctioned with 256 million tonnes peak rated capacity.

So far, 11 of such blocks have been operationalized and in the last financial year 17.5 million tonnes of coal was produced there. The ministry has developed a coal block portal on PM Gatishakti National Master Plan, to facilitate visibility of geographical features for bidders. Captive and commercial mines produced 147 million tonnes of coal in FY24, an increase of nearly 48%, reported by ET earlier.

A senior government official had earlier said production from captive and commercial mines will likely breach 170 million tonnes this fiscal. Coal production target for FY30 has been set at around 1.5 billion tonnes, as per the ministry.