PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Coal developer Aspire Mining on Wednesday told shareholders that its Ovoot project, in Mongolia, could assist in addressing a projected 16-million- to 22-million-tonne shortage of fat coking coal in China, out to 2025.

China’s ‘fat’ coal category encapsulates high fluidity coals with good plastic and excess caking properties that are used to blend lower quality coking coals.

The ASX-listed Aspire had appointed international coal market consultants Fenwei Energy Information Services to undertake a coal quality competitive assessment of the Ovoot project as part of an early development plan prefeasibility study.

The report found that fat coal, as a percentage of total Chinese coal blends, was expected to rise from 13.6% to 14.7% over the period to 2025, resulting in fat coal demand of 76-million tonnes a year. Of this, only 11-million tonnes a year of low sulphur fat is expected to be mined from Chinese sources, the report said.

Aspire said that given the forecast of higher proportion in blends, the demand for fat coal in China was rising at a time when domestic production would be stagnant.

“Due to the stricter requirements on coke quality in large blast furnaces and the increasing blend ratio of hard coking coal, fat coal market may see a large gap of 16-million to 22-million tonnes a year in 2018 to 2025, which needs to be filled by imported coal, especially low and medium sulphur fat coal,” said the report.

Aspire chairperson David Paull said that the targeted 3-million to 4-million tonnes a year of washed fat coal production from the Ovoot early development plan would go part of the way to meeting this expected deficit.

Aspire in December last year settled a A$15-million strategic financing package that would allow the company to complete the prefeasibility study on the early development plan project.