News

June 29, 2009

Onto The Backburner: Udokan, Russia’s Biggest Unmined Copper Project, Is Officially Allowed To Languish

By John Helmer in Moscow

The Udokan copper deposit, in southeastern Siberia, will not be mined any time soon, according to government and commercial mining sources in Moscow. For miners, who have been watching this particular copper pot pass from one hand to another, including BHP's very briefly in 1992, this should come as no surprise. According to one of the current stakeholders with the mining licence, Alisher Usmanov's Metalloinvest, there is simply too much copper in the market to warrant the capital cost of digging more out of Udokan.

Officially, all the closely-held Metalloinvest group will say is that after a nine-month delay it has finally signed the Udokan licence agreement with the federal mine licensing agency, Rosnedra, a branch of the Ministry of Natural Resources. The terms have been changed, Metalloinvest acknowledged in a press release: "In the course of negotiations between Metalloinvest and Rosnedra the parties reached an agreement about changes in the terms of the license agreement taking into...