Coal India May Become Nodal Entity to Exploit its CBM Blocks

The Indian government is planning to make state-owned Coal India Ltd. (CIL) the nodal company to commercially exploit the CBM in areas where it has coal mining leases.

Financial Chronicle has said in a report that government is mulling to come up with a new policy to fully exploit India’s coal bed methane (CBM) reserves worth 92 trillion cubic feet (TCF).

The move will allow CIL to extract methane, a clean fuel, before mining coal. The blocks operated by CIL will not be put up for global bidding for methane gas as is the case with the blocks where CIL does not operate.

Once the new policy is approved, CIL will offer the first set of five coal blocks with estimated CBM reserves of 30 billion cubic metres (bcm) to companies for exploration simultaneously with its own coal mining operations, the report said.

The coal and petroleum ministries are discussing the switch to the new policy in coal bed methane extraction.