Vedanta's Indian subsidiary hit by fire and smelter outage in same week

Vedanta Resources' Indian subsidiary Vedanta Limited will need to repair more than a third of its aluminium smelting pots after an outage earlier this week, while elsewhere a fire has put a power plant out of action for two months.

A 500kt smelter at the Jharsuguda smelter in the eastern state of Orissa "had an unfortunate pot outage incident", where 228 pots out a total 608 were damaged and taken out of production.

"The impacted pots will require to be repaired over the next few months, and put back into production," said Vedanta, adding that the exact timelines will be confirmed soon.

Furthermore, at the subsidiary's wholly owned Talwandi Sabo power plant in Punjab state, in the north, a fire at the plant's coal handling plant has forced all three units of the 1980MW site to shut for repairs.

Repairs are expected to take around 60 days, with the plant having achieved full ramp up during the 2017 financial year and availability of 85% in the fourth quarter.

"There were no injuries in either incident. The operational teams at the respective locations are working towards rectification, and safe and expeditious restart of the affected facilities," the FTSE-listed parent company said.