Fossil Fuel Supply for India's Coal-fired Power Plants

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Storage and Onward Transportation

Storage of coal within the port premises is necessitated some time as a back up in the event ships do not arrive or shipping operations are suspended for a certain period during which time coal supply to the power plant would not be available. Also, if there are off take from the plant due to some plant operation problems storage will become necessary.

It also becomes necessary in cases where coal has to be supplied to different plants from the same port. In such a case, all necessary systems such as stacking and reclaiming systems etc are required to be installed. Adequate storage area also has to be planned near the port area. In the Udupi power project, Mundra UMPP and North Chennai project, large storage in the port area is provided.

Onward transportation to the plant would be either by belt conveyors or pipe conveyors or through a Merry Go Round System (MGR).

Although Belt conveyors are the best means of transportation of coal from the port to the plant in view of their high reliability, they were not very popular earlier except in cases where the transportation distance was about 4 to 5 kilometres mainly due to cost. Designers were adopting lower speeds and therefore the cost would be much higher than other modes of transportation. But with the development of high speed conveyors and advanced design techniques, the cost has been optimised, and long distance conveying through conventional troughed belt conveyors are gaining popularity now. Developments in design have also taken into account the reliability requirements.

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Another recent trend has been the adoption of long distance pipe conveyors which are environmentally friendly, safe against sabotage etc. In the earlier eras pipe conveyors especially for long distance conveying were still under development and therefore were not very popular and not attractive cost wise.

Again, as in the case of conventional troughed belt conveyors, developments in design techniques have optimised the cost. Reliability also has been given due considerations in these recent trends.

These concepts arising from the recent trends and developments have been implemented in many projects and the results can be established only after observations over time. In case of pipe conveyors, although lot of developments are taking place in design methods, lot of impetus is still required to be infused to go further in design developments and also to set international design standards.

Merry Go Round Systems

In this scenario, Merry Go Round (MGR) systems were the most popular mode of transportation in the past. With the development of high speed conveyors and improvements in conveyor design techniques, the cost of transportation using conventional troughed belt conveyors and pipe conveyors have become very competitive. All the same even now MGR systems are also in vogue in some projects.

In this method of transportation, a rake loading system such as flood loading system is normally installed at the port end which can load the rakes in motion at a high loading rates using storage and live hoppers, gates weighing systems etc. At the plant end the rakes arriving from the port or the terminal are unloaded into a track hopper of about 250 metres length with paddle feeders for unloading the coal.

The coal wagons are Bottom Opening Broad Gauge wagons (BOBR) only which can unload coal into an underground track hopper and not other type of wagons. The key to economic success of this system is the distance of transportation as shorter the distance, shorter can be the cycle time and there by achieving higher throughputs for the system. 25 kilometres transportation is a very good distance from cost point of view.

The track and the rolling stock can be captive or by railways. Of late, Indian railways do not encourage usage of BOBR wagons due to limited availability of such wagons. Alternatively, the rolling stock also has to be captive. Although Indian Railways have introduced “Own you wagon scheme” where in the railways operate the wagons for some time and return the wagons to the plant developer adoption of the MGR system has not been adopted on a large scale.

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