Case Study

UNLEASHING LANJIGARH:

LINEARITY OF PERFORMANCE & INTEGRATED PLANNING

Vedanta’s aluminium assets have been envisioned to be fully integrated operations with secured bauxite and coal sources, in-house alumina refinery and captive power plants.

Lanjigarh is a small town located in the eastern part of India in Odisha. Situated here is our state-of-the-art alumina refinery, led by a diverse team of global and local talent. It forms a crucial link in our value chain, as it feeds our aluminium smelters at Jharsuguda and BALCO.

In the past two years, the refinery has had an exemplary run, with alumina production volumes growing at 22% CAGR, while the cost of production has declined by 8% CAGR to sub-300 $/T levels. The refinery delivered its highest-ever production of 1.8 million tonnes of alumina in FY2020, 21% higher than FY2019.

Since its inception, the refinery has been fed by several bauxite sources globally. As a result, achieving consistent plant productivity was challenging. To mitigate this long-standing challenge, a comprehensive operational excellence programme was run at the refinery from quarry to lorry (from bauxite sources to alumina dispatch), supported by an aggressive war-room approach that examined each step in the process for revamping and optimising.

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INTRODUCING LINEARITY OF PERFORMANCE

As a result of the operational excellence initiative, the multitude of bauxite sources were cut down to three to four sustainable sources, chosen based on geological similarities.

This directly enhanced plant productivity and improved alumina recovery. A second challenge was the prevalence of high atmospheric moisture levels aggravated by Indian monsoons. This adversely affected the bauxite quality and impacted our production levels.

To contain this risk, we undertook extensive sampling across the supply chain to identify points of moisture ingress and went on to mitigate the issue. This risk identification and mitigation model was replicated throughout the plant, helping us improve and evolve our operating processes.

INTEGRATED PLANNING ACROSS PROCESSES AND STAKEHOLDERS

Committed to continuous improvement, we conducted a production loss mapping exercise across various stages of the refinery, along with a relentless focus on plant maintenance. With the introduction of robust production planning across sourcing, logistics, handling, operations & maintenance, equipment availability and turnaround time improved dramatically. Detailed logistics planning and ensuing debottlenecking projects helped enable the production teams to operate with higher versatility across parameters.

HEALTH, SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENT (HSE)

Best-in-class HSE performance has always been at the core of the process execution at Lanjigarh. To reaffirm this, several concerted and award-winning efforts were undertaken at the unit to further enhance the overall sustainability of our operations.

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LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO DRIVE EFFICIENCY

The Aluminium & Power Sector and General Electric (GE) signed an agreement to implement GE’s Digital Smelter solutions at its largest smelter in India at Jharsuguda to significantly increase its operational efficiency and productivity. A first-of-its-kind deployment in any aluminium plant in India, the digital twin technology is part of Vedanta’s long-term commitment to digital transformation. Together with advanced analytics, this technology is expected to substantially reduce specific power consumption at the smelter. Typically, a one percent reduction in specific power consumption effected by digital smelter solutions can save about US$4-5 million annually in the smelter potlines alone, for every one million tonne of aluminium produced annually. In addition, this digital solution is expected to improve raw material utilisation, increase smelter pot life, enhance operational efficiency, maximise safety and reduce wastage, thereby delivering best-in-class performance outcomes and significant cost savings.