Adani Group is venturing into the copper business by setting up a smelter and refining facility at Kutch in Gujarat.

The newly formed group entity, Mundra Copper Ltd, last week applied to the central government for an industrial license to set up a copper concentrate smelting and refining facility, filing with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade shows.

The application made by the company, an arm of Adani Enterprises, on February 21 comes close to a month after group head Gautam Adani at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit expressed his intention to invest Rs 55,000 crore in Gujarat over the next five years in a clutch of projects.

Adani Enterprises in last November made Mundra Copper a wholly-owned subsidiary, as per disclosures made to the exchanges at that time. The subsidiary is now being manned by directors like Haresh Rajmal Mehta, Adani group's vice president of Corporate Finance who also serves on the board of Adani Water.

The project, as per a previous filing with the environment ministry made by Adani Enterprises, would be set up at an investment of Rs 10,000 crores spread over 634 acres within Adani Port Special Economic Zone in Mundra

The project envisages producing 1 million tonnes of copper cathode and 5 lakh tonnes of the copper rod a year and also 50 tonnes of gold and 500 tonnes of silver as by-products. The deal, once commissioned, will more than mitigate the crisis hitting the domestic copper availability with the closure of Vedanta's smelter in Tuticorin.

With the recent Supreme Court refusal to restart Vedanta's copper plant setting aside the order of the National Green Tribunal- about 4 lakh tonnes of copper smelting capacity has gotten idle.

The Tuticorin smelter contributed 48% of the refined copper production in the country during FY18 and its closure brought down refined copper availability to 5.1 lakh tonnes this year, rating agency Icra had said.

METAL METTLE

Mundra Copper last week applied for an industrial licence to set up a copper concentrate smelting and refining facility in Gujarat