India’s National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO) & Neelachal Ispat Nigam Limited (NINL) executed a Memorandum of Understanding last week regarding establishing a joint venture for the production of coal tar pitch. The agreement is part of Nalco’s wider business plan to continue building towards backward integration for sustaining its mainline operations.
The plan is to establish a coal tar distillation plant using coal tar produced by NINL’s coke oven plant located on the grounds of its steel plant in Kalinganagar, an industrial town in northeast Odisha. According to the agreement, NINL will also be preparing the required techno-economic feasibility report.
“The agreement is part of the new business plan of NALCO to ensure backward integration and sustain the plans for forward integration,” explained Nalco’s chairman and managing director Dr. Tapan Kumar Chand.
Nalco was established in 1981 as a public sector company administered by the Ministry of Mines. It is the largest integrated aluminium complex in Asia, and the sixth largest in the world.