Posted on 08/10/2011 8:43:05 AM PDT by bananaman22
Pity poor Mongolia, bereft of fiscal resources, caught between the ambitions of its superpower neighbors, Russia and China.
Ulaan Bator’s situation is akin to interwar Poland, dexterously attempting to reconcile its foreign policy between the USSR’s hammer and Nazi Germany’s hard place. Who will ultimately benefit is anyone’s guess, but the country’s nascent energy and mineralogical riches have opened the land of Genghis Khan to a fierce bidding war those ultimate outcome is unclear at best.
The nation is essentially empty, its 2.8 million citizens producing an average population density of just over 1 person per sq. km.
That said, the country’s mineralogical riches are more than impressive. More importantly for global mining interests, Mongolia was a Soviet satrapy from 1924 until the 1991 implosion of the USSR and those reserves remained offline.
Until now.
Whaddya looking for? Mongolia's mining sector has some of the world's richest deposits of gold and copper, uranium, coal, fluorspar as well as (rare earth elements) RREs such as tantalum, niobium, thorium, yttrium and zircon. According to a 2009 estimation by the U.S. Geological Survey, Mongolia has 31million tons of rare earth reserves, or 16.77 percent of the world’s total, exceeded only by China.
Oh, and coal.
Erdenes, a state firm is overseeing the Tavan Tolgoi ("Five Hills") massive coal deposit located in the east Tsankhi area of Mongolia’s Gobi desert, estimated to hold over 7.5 billion metric tons of coking coal, essential for making steel, and the currently world's biggest untapped deposit.
Where’s it gonna go?
Potential suitors include Russian, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean firms, while representatives from 20 global investment banks jetted into sunny Ulaan Bator to make their pitches.
While Mongolia’s economy was traditionally based on herding and agriculture, neighboring China’s rising demand for minerals has underpinned its current mining boom, and Beijing would undoubtedly happily buy virtually all of Tavan Tolgoi’s output. Full article at: Mongolia Energy Riches Attract Neighbors and Outside Interests
Word has it that the Chinese want to absorb Mongolia.
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