State-owned CIL on Friday said the current coal stock of 43 million tonnes (MT) at its pithead is likely to increase further by the end of the current financial year and this will help the company gear up for meeting the coal demand of summer which is on the advent. Coal India Ltd (CIL) accounts for over 80 per cent of the overall domestic coal output.

“The current coal stock of 43 MT at CIL’s pitheads is expected to increase further by FY22-end,” the state-owned company said in a statement. The fuel supply by CIL to the power sector peaked to a historic high of 493 million tonnes (MT) as on Thursday in the ongoing fiscal, breaching the previous high of 491.5 MT that the Maharatna coal miner recorded in FY19.

The public sector undertaking (PSU) could achieve the feat with 28 days still to go before the fiscal’s end, CIL said in a statement. During the April-February period of the current fiscal, CIL supplied 90 MT more coal to the power sector than it did during the corresponding period last year.

CIL’s coal despatch stood at 488 MT to this major coal-consuming sector ending February 2022. This represents a sizeable growth of around 23 per cent, compared with 398 MT during the year-ago period. The major challenge for CIL during the year was to adjust to the unpredictability of the coal demand. The coal-based power generation witnessed a muted growth in previous two financial years. Then, it had risen sharply to 11.2 per cent till January compared to the same period a fiscal ago. However, the company had managed to push additional quantities of coal.

Continuing in the same vein, at 48.4 MT in February, CIL posted a robust 22 per cent growth in supplies to the power sector. This was a jump of 8.6 MT, compared with 39.8 MT of February FY’21.Stepping up on supplies in the remainder of March, CIL aims to close the fiscal with 548 MT offtake to the power sector as projected by the Central Electricity Authority.