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By Euan Paulo C. Añonuevo, Reporter
The country would require huge investments to
develop its indigenous coal supply amid a projected growth in demand
for the resource in the coming years.
Rufino Bomasang, Sultan Mining and Energy
Development Corp. chairman, said that new power plants in the
country are now designing their facilities to have the flexibility
of maximizing the use of low-rank local coal.
“This decision of power producers to use low
rank coal should lead to an accelerated expansion of the Philippine
coal mining industry,” he said.
Because of its abundance and relatively cheaper
cost, the government has been promoting the use of local coal for
power generation.
Bomasang said that until recently, many power plants and cement
plants had been reluctant to use local coal due to its supposedly
poor quality. Thus, most facilities are designed to use imported
coal.
But the development of new technologies such as the current
fluidized bed technologies or clean coal technologies have allowed
power plants to burn coal with a wide range of rank and quality.
Most of the current local coal producers are
small companies with limited access to financing and technology and
with very little experience in large scale mining, Bomasang said.
Data from the Department of Energy showed that
the country would need about P162.3 billion worth of investments for
indigenous coal exploration and development until 2014.
Of that amount, P45.6 billion will be required
to develop potential areas in Luzon, P77.4 billion for Visayas, and
P39.3 billion for Mindanao.
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