Tirunelveli: Tamilnadu Industries Minister Thangam Thennarasu has said the technical glitch was rectified and oxygen production at the Vedanta’s Sterlite Copper Smelter plant in Thoothukudi will resume soon.
Talking to reporters here, he said the technical snag in Sterlite oxygen plantâs âCold Boxâ had been rectified and the preliminary steps for heating-up of the plant had already started. The plant will start generating oxygen shortly, he said.
After the technical glitch was noticed, experts from the Indian Space Research Organisationâs Propulsion Research Complex (IPRC) came to the plant on request from Thoothukudi District Collector K Senthil Raj to help the company’s technicians in rectifiying the glitch.
Now that the technical issues in the cold box and the checking of allied units had been completed, the plant is ready for oxygen generation, Thennarasu said.
The snag occurred on 14 May a day after the Group transported its first congisnment of 4.80 tonnes of medical grade oxygen, with 98.6 per cent purity, from its plant to Tirunelveli.
Vedanta said, “a technical snag has developed in the cold box at our oxygen plant in Thoothukudi, leading to a temporary pause in production”.
The possibility of minor technical fluctuation was anticipated given that the plant has been unattended for three years, it said.
“In preparation of this scenario, a technical expert group has been onsite from day one to monitor the situation and provide realtime solutions for resuming production at the earliest,” the release said.
“We plan to return to stabilised production soon,” it added. Days after the Tamilnadu government granted permission for the Vedanta Group to re-open its Sterlite copper smelter plant to manufacture oxygen alone, the company started producing liquid oxygen from 12 May and the first batch was sent to Tirunelveli on 13 May.
“In view of the crisis, our focus was on commencing the production of liquid oxygen at the earliest which has been implemented immediately. One of our oxygen plants has commenced production from 12 May and the first tanker carrying 4.8 tons of liquid oxygen was sent to Tirunelveli,” he added.
“We will be dispatching two oxygen tankers on a daily basis to begin with and gradually scale this up as we expand production,” he added.
The plant was closed since May 2018 after 13 anti-sterlite protestors were killed in a police firing.
Citing the unprecedented shortage of oxygen for Covid patients across the country, the company approached the Supreme Court seeking nod to re-open the plant to manufacture oxygen alone to meet the demand.
The Tamilnadu government had convened an all party meeting and gave the nod in line with the Apex Court’s order and also formed a monitoring committee to ensure that the company manufactures oxygen alone and that no other unit was re-opened.
After overhauling the oxygen plant in a short span of time, the company started producing oxygen from the plant.