Thiess is one of what is believed to be four companies selected by India’s biggest power producer, NTPC, to submit bids bring its first coal mine onstream by 2008.
The other bidders are understood to include Washington Group International; a consortium led by government-owned Singareni Collieries; and a major Indonesia miner.
NTPC is in the process of issuing pricing documents to the short-listed bidders for the Pakhri Barwadih mine in Bihar state. Pricing bids are likely to be due for submission by late January and the contract to be awarded in March or April next year.
Production will be ramped up to 10 million tonnes per annum as quickly as possible, with later expansions planned to 15-17Mtpa.
NTPC generates 27% of India’s electricity from 21 wholly owned power stations and four joint venture plants – 15 of them fired by coal, largely sourced from state-owned Coal India.
The group plans to triple its generating capacity to 75,000MW by 2017. To secure fuel for the additional capacity, NTPC has put its boot on seven coal properties – including Pakhri Barwadih – with a total allocated capacity of 65Mtpa.
It hopes Pakhri Barwadih will provide a model it can adopt on the other properties.
India is the world’s third-largest producer of coal, after China and the United States, but contract mining is still not widely accepted. State-owned Coal India does all its own mining and owns all its own equipment.
However, there is a growing desire to improve production and quality and reduce environmental impacts by improving the use of technology, NTPC deputy general manager coal mining AB Haldar told an Austrade mining mission in New Delhi.
Thiess has had a permanent presence in India for the past 12 months and hopes Pakhri Barwadih will be its first break and enable it to demonstrate the services a professional contractor can offer.
“We take a whole of mine service approach – not just technology but also the HR and management processes which are also essential,” Thiess India manager projects Bill Dixon told MiningNews.net.
“We’ve done it before in Indonesia, and with considerable success.”
Thiess was also short-listed by Coal India subsidiary Eastern Coalfields earlier this year to develop the 10-15Mtpa Rajmahal openpit, northwest of Kolkata in Jharkhand state, to feed NTPC’s Farakka power station in West Bengal and Kahalgaon plant in Bihar.
However, the process has been delayed by court action brought by one of the other bidders.
