RCC is investing $50 million in development

MOSCOW

Russian Copper Company will make investments totaling $50 million USD in 2013.

By September 2013 the group will have completed the construction of the Mikheevsky mining and processing facility  in the Chelyabinsk region.  Andrei Gaydin, the vice president of Russian Copper Company, told RusBusinessNews that the project began in 2011 and is intended to be operational for 25 years.  In addition to copper, RCC plans to also mine gold and silver there.  The facility will have an output of 18 million tons of copper ore per year, as well as 270,000 tons of  finished products (copper concentrate).  The use of innovative technology will make it possible to extract up to 85% of the copper.  Investment in the project will amount to 27 billion rubles.

According to Vsevolod Levin, the president of Russian Copper Company, the group intends to further expand its base of raw materials.  In particular, RCC is interested in developing the Tarutinskoe deposit in Kazakhstan.  There are plans to process the ore mined there at the Mikheevsky mining and processing facility.  But Tarutinskoe's future has not yet been settled.  This deposit will be raffled off in a restricted tender to the party offering the organizers the highest sum.  Additional difficulties in developing the deposit stem from its location on Kazakhstan's border with Russia, entailing restrictions on the use of land.

Russian Copper Company's interests extend far beyond the former Soviet Union.  RCC is currently considering spending 60 million euros to purchase the company Soremi, which owns a license to develop a copper deposit in the Congo with a high copper content (5 grams per ton of ore, as compared to 0.4 grams at the Mikheevskoe deposit), but it will be quite expensive to develop: the remote African province offers no infrastructure.  For that reason, any final decision about investments in expanding RCC's raw-materials base will be made at a later date.