1. Why coking coal is a different problem from India's other coal imports

India mines more coal than almost any country on earth — 1,047.5 million tonnes in FY2024-25, the highest annual total in the country's history, per the Ministry of Coal's own Year End Review. Most of that is thermal coal, burned for power, and on that front India has been genuinely closing the import gap: overall coal imports fell 7.9% in FY2024-25 to 243.62 MT, saving an estimated $7.93 billion (₹60,681.67 crore) in foreign exchange, and the coal imported specifically to blend into thermal power plants fell 54.17% year-on-year, from 12 MT to just 5.5 MT by December 2025 (down from 35 MT in 2022-23).

Coking coal doesn't share in that improvement, and can't, for a geological reason rather than a policy failure: it needs a specific carbon and ash content to survive the coking process intact and produce metallurgical-grade coke for a blast furnace, and India's own coal seams are overwhelmingly the wrong grade for that — high-ash, non-coking thermal coal, which is exactly what the country has in abundance. The result is a stark asymmetry: while India is broadly self-sufficient in the iron ore that goes into steel, it imports an estimated 90% of the coking coal that goes in alongside it, making coking coal the single most expensive raw material in Indian steel production.

2. Mission Coking Coal: the government's actual answer

The Ministry of Coal's real response to coking coal dependency is a domestic-mining and processing programme called Mission Coking Coal, launched in 2022 under the broader Aatmanirbhar Bharat push, and it works on three fronts — more mining, more washing, and more of what's already mined actually going into a blast furnace.

Production targets. Domestic raw coking coal production stood at 59.6 MT in FY2024-25. The Ministry's target for FY2025-26 is 83 MT, rising to 140 MT by FY2029-30 — roughly a 2.4× increase from current output inside five years. Coking coal was also notified as a critical and strategic mineral in the run-up to the 2026 Budget, a status change intended to accelerate domestic exploration and mining approvals specifically for it.

Washery capacity. Raw coal straight out of the ground isn't usable in a coke oven; it has to be washed to reduce ash content first, and washing capacity has historically been a bottleneck. The Ministry's plan takes coking-coal washery capacity from 30 MT today to 58 MT by FY2030, via eight new washeries planned by Coal India Limited (2 already under construction, 4 with Letters of Intent/Award issued, 2 pending re-tender), alongside modernisation of Bharat Coking Coal Limited and Central Coalfields Limited's existing washeries, which have outlived their designed lifespan.

Stamp-charging technology. This is the piece of the programme that most resembles a "substitution" story, but it isn't a biomass one — it's a domestic-coal one. Stamp-charging is a coke-making technique that compacts the coal blend before it goes into the oven, which allows a higher proportion of India's own (lower-quality) coking coal to be blended in without compromising coke strength. The Ministry states this raises the domestic-coal share of the blend from roughly 10% to 30% — a real substitution of imported coking coal, achieved through process technology on India's own coal, not through a different material altogether.

New coking coal blocks. The Ministry has auctioned 16 coking coal blocks to private-sector bidders, with production expected to begin by 2028-29 — a multi-year lag typical of new coal-mine development, which is one reason the FY2025-26 target (83 MT) still sits well below the FY2029-30 target (140 MT): most of the new capacity simply isn't online yet.

3. The real biomass-pellet mandate is for a different coal entirely

India does have a genuine, government-mandated biomass-pellet co-firing programme — it's just not this one. The SAMARTH Mission (Sustainable Agrarian Mission on Use of Agri-Residue in Thermal Power Plants), run by the Ministry of Power, mandates that coal-based thermal power plants co-fire 5% biomass pellets (made from crop residue such as rice straw) alongside their coal from FY2024-25, rising to 7% from FY2025-26. It was designed to curb stubble burning and cut power-sector coal demand — a genuinely important programme, and one this piece has covered on its own terms elsewhere — but it applies to thermal coal burned for electricity, administered by a different ministry, under a different policy, for a different purpose than steel-making.

Coking coal and thermal coal are not interchangeable inputs, and neither are their substitutes. A biomass pellet that works for a power-plant boiler, burned simply for heat, does not automatically work in a coke oven or blast furnace, where the material also has to provide mechanical strength and a specific carbon structure to hold up a column of iron ore and limestone. That is the real reason "biomass substitution" hasn't scaled in steel-making the way it has in power generation: it's a harder metallurgical problem, not a policy oversight.

4. How the blending mandate is actually enforced, and how CERC prices it

The SAMARTH mandate isn't the only biomass-co-firing rule in force, and the sourcing for this section turned up something worth flagging rather than smoothing over: there appear to be two related but not fully reconciled compliance tracks, run by different bodies, with different phase-in percentages for the same period.

The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) in the National Capital Region and adjoining areas enforces a separate, geography-specific rule — the Environment (Utilisation of Crop Residue by Thermal Power Plants) Rules, 2023 — requiring coal-based thermal plants within 300 km of Delhi to co-fire crop-residue-based biomass pellets or briquettes with coal. Under CAQM's own enforcement, the requirement was 3% for FY2024-25, stepping up to 7% for FY2025-26. That 3% figure for FY2024-25 does not match the 5% figure the national SAMARTH mandate specifies for the same year (Section 3) — this piece could not find a single source reconciling why the Delhi-NCR enforcement track and the national mandate quote different starting percentages for the same fiscal year, and is stating both rather than picking one to avoid overstating precision it doesn't have.

What isn't ambiguous is that CAQM enforcement has real teeth. In a compensation order published 26 December 2025, CAQM found six major thermal plants in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh had missed their FY2024-25 co-firing targets and demanded a combined ₹61.85 crore in environmental compensation, with each plant given 15 days to respond:

CAQM has also flagged a possible future expansion of the co-firing zone outward to plants 300–500 km from Delhi — not yet notified as a firm rule at the time this piece was researched, but indicative of where enforcement is heading.

How CERC actually prices the biomass into the tariff. Co-firing isn't free for a generating station, and the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission's Terms and Conditions of Tariff Regulations set out exactly how that extra cost gets passed through to what the plant is allowed to charge. The mechanism runs on a defined term, "Landed Fuel Cost," which for a co-firing plant explicitly includes biomass alongside coal — the delivered cost of the biomass at the plant's own unloading point, inclusive of taxes, duties, and handling charges, calculated the same way coal's landed cost is. Two features of the regulation matter for how much a plant can actually claim:

• The energy charge rate for the blended fuel is calculated using biomass consumption at either the officially mandated blending ratio or the plant's actual biomass consumption — whichever is lower. A plant cannot claim cost recovery for more biomass than it actually burned, even if the mandate technically required more.
• Separately, a plant's approved capital cost can include the cost of biomass handling equipment and facilities specifically added to enable co-firing — recognising that receiving, storing and feeding pellets is added infrastructure a coal-only plant didn't need.

The reason this pass-through mechanism exists at all is that biomass pellets cost meaningfully more than the coal they're displacing. Reported landed-cost figures put biomass pellets in the roughly ₹9,000–13,000 per tonne range against coal at around ₹5,000 per tonne — a gap wide enough that, in at least one regulatory cost estimate this piece found, co-firing at mandated levels added on the order of ₹0.13 per unit to the generation cost. CERC's landed-cost and lower-of-mandate-or-actual mechanics exist precisely to keep that added cost tied to real, verifiable biomass purchases rather than a blanket assumption, before it flows into what a distribution company — and ultimately a consumer's bill — ends up paying.

5. Where biomass actually is entering Indian steel-making — carefully, and at pilot scale

There is one real, India-specific attempt at exactly this substitution, and it's worth being precise about both what it is and how small it currently is. On 24 August 2024, SAIL's Rourkela Steel Plant, working with the company's own Research and Development Centre for Iron and Steel (RDCIS), began injecting biochar — made from babool (acacia) and bamboo via pyrolysis — into Blast Furnace #1, replacing a portion of the plant's Pulverized Coal Injection (PCI). This was the first use of biochar anywhere in SAIL's operations. Separately, RDCIS has also been running pilot coke-oven trials testing partial replacement of India's own indigenous coking coal.

Two distinctions matter here, and are easy to blur in secondary coverage. First, PCI is not the same stream as coking coal: PCI is pulverised coal injected directly into the blast furnace's tuyeres as a supplementary fuel and reductant, alongside coke, not the coal that goes through the coke ovens to become coke itself — so the Rourkela biochar trial, as reported, substitutes into the PCI stream, while RDCIS's separate coke-oven trials are the ones actually testing substitution into the coking-coal stream proper. Second, this is described in every source this piece found as a pilot or trial, targeting up to 10% of PCI at Rourkela specifically — not a national programme, not a Ministry of Coal or Ministry of Steel mandate, and not yet a meaningful dent in the roughly 90%-import-dependent coking coal picture described in Section 1.

6. The real substitution research — and the farmer-income case it implies, if it ever scales

Beyond SAIL's PCI-focused pilot, there is a separate, more directly relevant strand of published research aimed at the coke stream itself: bio-coke, made by blending biochar with India's lower-grade coking coal rather than replacing coking coal with biochar outright. This is lab-scale academic work, not a deployed technology, but it is real, peer-reviewed and specific about the numbers — and it points toward a genuine, if still hypothetical, connection to farmer income that this piece has not seen made explicitly elsewhere.

Published research (Fuel Processing Technology, 2023) tested coal-biochar blend ratios from 90:10 down to 50:50, using biochar made from coconut shell, groundnut shell, sawdust and sugarcane bagasse — all genuine agricultural or agro-processing residues, not the babool/bamboo SAIL used at Rourkela. The best-performing blends were narrower than the full range tested: roughly 70:30 coal-to-biochar for coconut-shell and groundnut-shell biochar, and 80:20 for sawdust biochar, carbonised at 900–1000°C. Coke quality for blast-furnace use is judged on two standard metrics — Coke Reactivity Index (CRI, lower is better) and Coke Strength after Reaction (CSR, higher is better) — and an 85:15 coal-to-coconut-shell-char blend achieved a CRI of 29.8 and CSR of 55.1, which the paper reports as meeting blast-furnace-usable criteria. Separately, a related line of research has examined coconut-shell-derived bio-coke specifically as a metallurgical-coke replacement.

The farmer-income logic, stated plainly and hedged appropriately: coconut shell, groundnut shell and sugarcane bagasse are by-products of crops millions of Indian farmers already grow — coconut and groundnut cultivation and sugarcane processing generate these residues regardless of what happens to them afterward, and today a meaningful share is low-value, burned, or discarded. If bio-coke blending were ever validated at industrial scale and adopted by steel plants at even a modest blend ratio, it would create a new, steel-industry-sized demand stream for exactly these residues — the same basic mechanism (turning an agricultural by-product into a saleable industrial input) that already underpins the farmer-income case made for ethanol from crop residue and ethanol/CBG feedstock diversification elsewhere on this site, and the one broader biochar research (not specific to bio-coke) has separately estimated could support on the order of 520,000 rural jobs nationally if agricultural-residue-to-biochar conversion were scaled across all its potential uses, not steel-making alone.

7. What TradeStat's own numbers show, and where they stop being specific to coking coal

The Ministry of Coal's own figures in Sections 1–2 are volume-based (million tonnes) and specifically about coking-grade coal. DGCI&S's TradeStat portal, queried directly for this piece on 14 August 2026, gives a second, independent, value-based (US$) view — but at the HS4-digit level available through TradeStat's commodity search, the codes don't isolate "coking coal" from thermal coal the way the Ministry of Coal's own sector reporting does. HS 2701 (coal briquettes, ovoids and similar solid fuels manufactured from coal) captures all non-agglomerated coal imports by value, coking and thermal combined; HS 2704 isolates coke and semi-coke specifically, which is closer to a steel-industry-specific figure. Both are shown below, with that distinction kept explicit rather than presented as a clean coking-coal number.

† FY2025-26 is provisional (TradeStat, data last updated 7 Aug 2026, retrieved 14 Aug 2026). Export and coke-import/export figures were only pulled for the two most recent fiscal years shown; earlier years were not queried for those columns.

Three things stand out in this data, and none of them require assuming HS 2701 equals coking coal specifically to be true. First, HS 2701's own trajectory doesn't match a simple "imports keep rising" story: value peaked in FY2022-23 at $48.0 billion — a peak driven at least partly by the global energy-price spike that year, not import volume alone — and has fallen in every year since, to $26.7 billion in FY2025-26, even as the Ministry of Coal's own volume-based coking-coal-import figures (Section 2) show demand still well above domestic supply. Falling dollar value alongside continued high import dependence is consistent with coal prices coming down globally since the 2022-23 spike, not with India needing less coal.

Second, India's coal exports under either code are close to a rounding error — $178–217 million for HS 2701, $36–41 million for HS 2704, against import figures roughly 30–150 times larger. This is a one-directional trade relationship, not a two-way market, exactly as the ~90% import-dependence figure in Section 1 would predict.

Third, and most useful for the coking-coal story specifically: finished coke imports (HS 2704, roughly $1.2–1.5 billion) are a small fraction of raw-coal imports (HS 2701, tens of billions). That gap is structurally consistent with everything in Sections 1–2 — India's steel sector overwhelmingly imports raw coking coal and converts it to coke domestically in its own coke ovens (which is exactly what Mission Coking Coal's washery expansion and stamp-charging reforms are built around), rather than importing already-made coke. It also means the coke-oven substitution trials mentioned in Section 5 are aimed at the far larger of the two flows.

7a. The real coking-coal-only import figure, and where it actually comes from

HS 27011910 ("COKING COAL") is a genuine subset of the broader HS 2701 total above — roughly 40–44% of it in dollar terms in the two years both were checked, which itself confirms that most of HS 2701's value is other (non-coking) coal, not coking coal, as the earlier caveat suspected:

The decline tracks the same direction as HS 2701 overall (Section 6), falling every year since the FY2022-23 price-spike peak, consistent with global coal prices easing rather than India needing less coking coal — the Ministry of Coal's own volume-based production targets (Section 2) show demand still rising, not falling.

TradeStat's Commodity x Country report, queried the same day for code 27011910, gives the full country breakdown behind that number — 13 source countries in FY2025-26:

Australia alone supplies roughly 43–46% of India's coking coal import bill in both years shown — more than the next four countries combined — consistent with Australia's position as the world's largest metallurgical-coal exporter. The next tier — USA, Russia, Mozambique, Canada, Indonesia — are each real coal-mining/exporting economies with direct production relevant to steel-grade coal.

Two entries don't fit that pattern and are worth flagging rather than reading at face value: Singapore and Switzerland are not coal-producing countries — both are established commodity-trading and re-invoicing hubs, and a meaningful share of the coal attributed to them in trade statistics is understood in commodity-trade literature to originate elsewhere (commonly Australia, Russia or Indonesia) and pass through a trader's books registered in one of these jurisdictions rather than being physically mined there. This piece could not determine what share of India's "Singapore" or "Switzerland" coking-coal imports is trade-hub re-invoicing versus a genuine alternative source, and treats both entries as likely overstating those two countries' role as actual mine-of-origin suppliers.

8. The honest shape of the story

Put together, the accurate picture is this: India's coking coal import dependency is real, large (~90%), and expensive, and the government's actual, funded, targeted response is Mission Coking Coal — a conventional mining-and-washing programme aiming to more than double domestic production by FY2029-30, plus a process-technology fix (stamp-charging) that lets more of India's own lower-grade coal into the blend. Biomass pellets are doing real substitution work in India's coal sector right now, but for thermal coal in power generation under a completely separate mandate (SAMARTH), not for coking coal in steel-making. The one genuine attempt to bring biomass into steel-making itself — SAIL's Rourkela biochar trial — is real, India-specific, and worth watching, but it is a single-furnace pilot aimed at a supplementary fuel stream, not a scaled substitution programme, and this piece found nothing to suggest it currently moves the needle on the 90% import-dependence figure that opens this article. Published bio-coke research (Section 6) points toward a real, if still lab-scale, path where agricultural-residue biochar — coconut shell, groundnut shell, sugarcane bagasse — could one day partially substitute India's lower-grade coking coal, with the same farmer-income logic that already underpins ethanol and crop-residue biomass policy elsewhere; but no source this piece found puts a number on how much of the ~90% import dependence that could actually close, or when.

Sources

• Fuel Processing Technology (2023), "Bio-coke: A sustainable solution to Indian metallurgical coal crisis," ScienceDirect — blend ratios, carbonisation temperatures, CRI/CSR coke-quality results for coconut shell, groundnut shell, sawdust and sugarcane bagasse biochar (abstract and secondary summaries; full text paywalled and not accessed directly)
• ScienceDirect, "Biochar production from crop residues, its characterization and utilization for electricity generation in India" and related biochar-potential research — India's ~600 million tonnes/year agricultural residue base and the ~520,000 rural-jobs estimate for decentralised biochar production (broader biochar end-uses, not bio-coke specific)
• DGCI&S, TradeStat, Commodity-wise Export/Import reports, HS 2701 and HS 2704, FY2020-21 through FY2025-26 (FY2025-26 provisional), queried directly 14 Aug 2026
• DGCI&S, TradeStat, Commodity-wise (HS 27011910 "COKING COAL") and Commodity x Country-wise reports, FY2022-23 through FY2025-26, queried directly 14 Aug 2026 — source of the country-wise coking-coal-only breakdown in Section 7a
• Ministry of Coal, PIB, "Ministry of Coal's Year End Review-2025" (12 Jan 2026) — coal production, import, and Mission Coking Coal figures (Section 4.3 of the release)
• Ministry of Coal, PIB, "Coking Coal Import due to Limited Domestic Availability" (12 Dec 2022, Rajya Sabha written reply) — historical import volumes and long-term supplier agreements
• Business Standard, "Govt notifies coking coal as critical mineral to cut import dependence" (Budget 2026 coverage)
• Ministry of Power, SAMARTH Mission, regulatory policy page; PIB, "Revised Biomass Policy mandates 5% biomass co-firing in Thermal Power Plants from FY 2024-25" (5%→7% co-firing mandate, thermal power plants specifically)
• PelletRates News, "₹61.85 Crore Penalties Issued: CAQM Cracks Down on Delhi-NCR Power Plants for Missing Biomass Co-Firing Targets" (order published 26 Dec 2025) — CAQM enforcement, per-plant penalty figures, 3%→7% Delhi-NCR co-firing schedule
• Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, Terms and Conditions of Tariff Regulations — "Landed Fuel Cost" definition (biomass inclusion), energy-charge-rate calculation methodology (lower of mandated ratio or actual consumption), and capital-cost treatment of biomass handling equipment
• SteelOrbis / Biochar Today, "Rourkela Steel Plant Leads SAIL with Biochar Injection in Blast Furnace" (28 Aug 2024, trial launched 24 Aug 2024)
• BigMint, "How are steel majors trialling biochar as a key decarbonisation lever?" — RDCIS pilot coke-oven testing of coking-coal replacement, babool/bamboo biochar properties

This piece deliberately separates a real, well-documented government programme (Mission Coking Coal) from a real-but-different government programme (SAMARTH biomass co-firing) and a real-but-small industry pilot (SAIL Rourkela's biochar trial), because "biomass replacing coking coal in India" is not, on the sourcing this piece could find, an accurate description of current Indian government policy. Where a claim could not be verified — particularly the current status of the Rourkela trial and any coke-oven substitution results — that is stated directly rather than filled in.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.