Aktogay, 20 October. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, via video link, launched construction of a copper smelter at the Aktogay deposit in Abai region: the KAZ Minerals group, with China's NFC, will build a plant with a capacity of 300,000 tonnes of copper cathode a year.
Besides copper, the plant will produce gold and sulphuric acid. Investment, according to published data, will be about $1.8 billion, and the first cathodes are expected in 2030. On the same day Tokayev met Wen Gang, chairman of the board of China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group (CNMC), to discuss industrial cooperation and Chinese participation in developing Kazakhstan's metallurgy. The project is described as one of the country's major industrial projects: copper is needed in energy, electronics and engineering.
The project has a long history. In 2015 KAZ Minerals studied building such a plant with a Chinese company, in 2017 it abandoned the project and wrote off $16 million, and in 2018 its principal shareholder Oleg Novachuk publicly called a domestic copper smelter in Kazakhstan economically pointless: China had enough spare capacity to process Kazakh concentrate, and Kazakhstan had a surplus of sulphuric acid.
Conditions have changed for the industry as a whole: on 20 October Kazakhstan approved a new method for calculating the cost of processing copper concentrate that takes into account production costs, regulated profit and an investment component. Preliminary estimates suggest processing costs could more than double, and cathode copper output in the country could exceed 1 million tonnes a year.
Copper cathode is pure copper in the form of cathode sheets produced by electrolysis; in this form the metal is sold on exchanges and sent to cable and rolling plants. When concentrate is processed abroad, the added value stays abroad too.
Background: Aktogay is one of KAZ Minerals' largest copper deposits in Abai region; spare capacity to process Kazakh concentrate, according to Novachuk in 2018, was available in China.
List of sources used: Metals ESG Trends, NEKhabar, Ulysmedia, Metals ESG Trends
Artificial intelligence was used in preparing this material.
