China’s Xinjiang Tebian Electric Apparatus Stock Co. Ltd (TBEA) has built a settlement for its employees engaged in developing two gold deposits — Duoba and Upper Kumargh — in the Ayni district of the Sughd province.
According to the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies (MoINT), more than 400 people, with nearly half of them being nationals of Tajikistan, are currently working at those goldfields. They are building the dressing works and carrying out exploration work.
“To-date, they have built the ore leaching site with annual capacity of 50,000 tons and the ore analysis laboratory. Besides, they have installed a substation and built a 29-kilometer power transmission line and a 21-kilometer road,” an official source at a MoINT told Asia-Plus in an interview.
A settlement for workers has also been built.
In all, TBEA plans to spend 180 million U.S. dollars for construction of the dressing works with all the infrastructure.
At the first stage, the dressing works will process up to 660,000 tons of ore annually.
Tajik government granted licenses to develop the Duoba and Upper Kumargh goldfields to TBEA in exchange for construction of a new combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Dushanbe.
Work on that 400-megawatt CHP plant was completed in December 2016 at a total cost of $349 million. Of that overall budget, around $17.4 million were provided by the Tajik government.
TBEA will work on the gold deposits as long as it takes to recoup its outlay. Afterward, the company plans to reach new deals on the management of these mines, but on different terms
The license for development of the Upper Kumargh gold deposit was granted to TBEA at the beginning of last year and the license for development of the Duoba gold deposit had been granted to TBEA earlier.
A total area of Duoba and Upper Kumargh deposits 15,400 square kilometers. The deposits reportedly contain proven gold reserves of around 51.7 tons and possibly up to 117.6 tons in total.
Xinjiang Tebian Electric Apparatus Stock Co. Ltd (TBEA) is one of the largest electrical manufacturing groups in China and the first floated stock company in Chinese A Shore Market in transmission industry of China after merging the former Hengyang Transformer Works (a large-size stated company founded in 1958 and located in Hunan province, China), and well-known for manufacturing all kinds of high voltage power transmission, transformation and distribution equipment. Under the administration of TBEA, there are 10 large backbone factories, 5 research institutes, 6 business entities and 8 participated enterprises.
