Anisul Islam Noor :
The government plans to increase coal extraction from local mine aiming to enhance electricity generation from the natural resource, Petrobangla sources said.
But the proposed open-pit mining at Barapukuria coalmine in Dinajpur depends on lifting of 344 million cubic metres of water and its successful management.
The government has targeted the Barapukuria coalmine as its depth is suitable for open pit mining to extract about 90 per cent of stock coal. The coalfield has a stock of 600 million tonnes. A power plant of 5000MW capacity will servive for 40 years by the extracted coal, Professor Hossain Monsur, Chairman of Petrobangla said.
The government handed over the Barapukuria coalmine to Petrobangla for preparing extraction of coal. Petrobangla has completed 2D survey for justifying actual stock. Now it has been waiting to get water management report from the experts appointed.
Petrobangla Director (Operation and Mines) Md Quamruzzaman hinted at the open-pit option to meet the future power generation needs. He said 53 percent of the targeted production of 20,000MW planned in the Vision 2021 would be coal-based thermal power.
To meet the demand, the country will have to produce 10 million tonnes of coal per year. Currently, an estimated 1.65 million tonnes of coal are being produced annually from one mine through underground mining.
It was not immediately clear how the shortfall will be met, although Petrobangla claims that the country has five large coal mines with a combined reserve of 3.1 billion tonnes.
According to Petrobangla, less than three percent of power is being produced from coal in Bangladesh. By contrast, China produces 81 percent, Australia 69, India 68, US 43 and Germany 29.
About 75 percent of Bangladesh’s power is being generated from gas. Elaborating on the progress of open-pit mining, Quamruzzaman said, work on hydro geological survey and water modelling is underway in the northern part of Barapukuria in Dinajpur for extracting coal.
But extraction of coal from those reserves remains uncertain, as the government has failed to formulate a coal policy in the last one and a half decades.
