Uzbekistan plans to attract South Korean Sebine Technology to resume a project to produce aluminum and aluminum oxide from kaolin ores in the Tashkent province, the Ministry of Mining Industry and Geology said.
Executives of Sebine Technology visited the subsidiriaries of Uzbekkumir (UzbekCoal) company to study the properties of kaolin raw materials mined at the Angren lignite deposit in Tashkent province.
Repoprtedly, at a bilateral meeting, the parties reached an agreement to work on a number of Angren kaolin to aluminum and alumina projects.
Currently, there is no primary aluminum production in Uzbekistan. For the production of alumina, bauxite (aluminum ore) is mainly used in the world, which can only be imported from Africa, South America and Australia. In the early 2000s, Uzbekkumir, jointly with the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, developed technical regulation and organization of pilot industrial alumina-cement production based on secondary kaolins from the Angren deposit.
In 2008, the design All-Russian Aluminum-Magnesium Institute of the Rusal company and Uzbekkumir signed a memorandum on the joint development of pre-design documentation for the creation of a production facility of up to 500 thousand tons of alumina. However, during the preparation of the project, the parties failed to achieve the planned targets of commercial efficiency of the project.
According to experts, the explored and approved reserves of kaolin clays at the Angren deposit top 900 million tons, of which about 450 million tons can be used as raw materials for the production of alumina and aluminum.
