MINERAL-RICH MONGOLIA EMERGES AS LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

From Ahmad Zukiman Zain

ULAN BATOR, July 5 (Bernama) -- After spending the last eight years in
Dubai, Filipino engineer Dennis Pimentel has turned to Mongolia to join the
exodus of expatriate hands to magnetic Oyu Tolgoi mine.

“I like the place – the locals call it OT just like UB for Ulan Bator
because it’s cold and the people are warm...they are very hospitable."

As we bumped into each other at the airport, Pimentel said he needed the job
to support his wife and the couple's two sons, aged 12 and 16, in Manila.

“I design roads in OT (Oyu Tolgoi) but I don’t know when the project will
end, it’s a contract,” said the 37-year-old who has been in Mongolia over the
past five months.

OT is the world's largest undeveloped copper-gold project and is located in
the South Gobi region of Mongolia, approximately 550km south of the capital
Ulaanbaatar, and 80km north of the Mongolia-China border.

Pimentel has grown fond of Mongolia which has only 2.9 million people,
almost half of them living in the capital built for 500,000.

“Despite the mineral rich status, the Mongolians are environmental-conscious
and want to preserve the Gobi desert,” he said.

Mongolian Prime Minister S. Batbold said, the mining industry had been
intensively developing the country and a massive work on putting such world
class deposits as OT copper mine and Tavan Togoi coal deposit into economic
turnover have been actively conducted, attracting the interest of many
countries.

“Mongolia finds itself among countries with relatively high rates of
economic growth,” he told the Organisation of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA)
Executive Board Meeting (EBM) here last Tuesday.

“If in 2010, our economy enjoyed six per cent growth rate, in the first
quarter of 2011, it increased to 9.7 per cent,” he said.

The OT mine or Turquoise Hill is a combined open pit and underground mining
project in Khanbogd sum within the south Gobi Desert.

It is developed as a joint venture involving the Ivanhoe Mines of Canada,
Australia’s Rio Tinto and the Mongolian Government.

The production is scheduled to begin in 2013.

The OT mining project is the largest financial undertaking in Mongolia's
history and is expected, upon completion, to account for more than 30 per cent
of the country's gross domestic product.

Last year, the number of processing factories in the country increased by 10
per cent.

Noting the intense speed in growth of the trade and services sector,
Batbold said Mongolia was also proud of the robust penetration of information
technologies.

“A historic contribution of our nomadic ancestors to the world’s culture was
the communication system of 'morin urtuu’s' or horse relay station that the
Mongolians had organised in 13th-14th centuries to link China, Mongolia, Russia
and Europe,” he said.

Mongolian National News Agency (Montsame) General Director T. Baasansuren
said the economic future of Mongolia looked bright.

“The government has identified 17 large deposits of oil, copper, fluorite,
molybdenum, gold, uranium, etc...

"Bilateral and multilateral talks on joint exploration of these deposits
have been going on intensively,” he said, expressing confidence that the
development of mining would completely change the structure of Mongolia’s
economy.

“According to estimates of the international investment bank, JP Morgan,
Mongolia’s GDP will grow not less than by 15 per cent between 2011 and 2015.

"Hence in 2016, Mongolia’s GDP per capita will increase from the current
US$2,000 to US$8,000.

“When the Oyu Tolgoi copper deposit which attracted large international
attention is put into exploration in 2013, Mongolia will supply between three
and five per cent of the world’s copper,” said Baasansuren.