KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – India’s largest iron-ore miner, NMDC, has earmarked a capital expenditure (capex) of $902-million over the next two financial years.
NMDC has committed this investment even as the miner is on verge of starting commercial production of its three-million-ton greenfield steel plant in the central Indian province of Chhattisgarh entailing an investment of $1.94-billion, NMDC chairperson Baijender Kumar said after the company’s annual general meeting.
The miner has set a target to achieve iron-ore production of 67-million tons a year by 2021, up from levels of around 37-million tons a year at present, Kumar said.
To ramp up production, NMDC is setting up two screening plants: a 12-million-ton-a-year plant at its Bailadila mines in Chhattisgarh, and the seven-million-ton-a-year Donimalai mines plant in the southern Indian province of Karnataka.
Meanwhile, company sources said that Legacy Iron Ore, the ASX-listed subsidiary of NMDC, would spearhead the Indian miner’s overseas foray into gold and base metals starting with exploration work in some tenements in Australia.
The sources said that NMDC, on behalf of Legacy, had made applications to government of Western Australia seeking three exploration tenements for tungsten to add to its existing exploration across 19 other tenements.