The Ukrainian private energy company DTEK Energo accumulated significantly more coal before the start of the 2023-2024 fall and winter period than it did in 2021, DTEK Energo CEO Ildar Saleyev said.
“We’re doing everything for our thermal power plants to be ready to work at full power at any moment. To this end, we’re providing our thermal power generation facilities with enough fuel to work intensively. This concerns above all [coal] that we produce ourselves, but we’ve also been able to find opportunities to back the energy system up with extra import shipments,” Ukrainian media quoted Saleyev as saying in a DTEK press release on Monday.
Owing to these measures, the company accumulated “much more coal” before the start of the 2023-2024 heating season than it did at this same time in 2021, he said. In January-October 2023, DTEK Energo put into operation 21 new coalfaces and delivered 62,000 tonnes of thermal coal from Poland, which is nearly one-third of the 210,000 tonnes entered into import contracts with that country.
DTEK miners plan to open five more coalfaces in November and December, it said.
As reported, DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko said at a press conference in Kiev on October 12 that DTEK planned to invest UAH 7.4 billion in coal production by the end of 2023, which is nearly twice as much as in 2022 (UAH 3.8 billion).
The company produced 13.07 million tonnes of coal in January-September 2023, which is also slightly more than over the same period last year, he said.
“We should bring coal production to over 17 million tonnes by the end of the year. This is about the same as last year but more than the estimates we submitted to the Energy Ministry a few months ago,” Timchenko said.
DTEK Energo opened 18 new coalfaces in January-September 2023.
A first shipment of 4,200 tonnes of coal was delivered from Poland at the end of September.
Energy Minister German Galushchenko said nearly 1.4 million tonnes of coal had been stored at warehouses of Ukrainian thermal power plants and coalmines as of early October. The target for the heating season was 1.8 million tonnes.
According to reports from credible sources, the state-owned Ukrainian company Centrenergo has signed import contracts with Poland for about 1 million tonnes of coal. The company said on November 3 that it had started deliveries of imported coal, without specifying their volumes.