In a development that will give heart to the country’s mining sector, Papua New Guinea’s government has granted a 20-year mining lease to Mayur Resources’ US$350 million (K1.125 billion) Central Cement and Lime Project in Papua New Guinea’s Central Province.
Limestone Cliffs at Kido, Central Cement and Lime Project. Credit: Mayur Resources
The lease is the final statutory approval required for the project, with the developer now set to proceed to the construction stage, which will involve a quarry, plant site, 36 MW power station, and deep draft wharf.
According to Mayur Chairman, Rob Neale, the project will be PNG’s first integrated cement and lime project. The product from the mine will be used in local construction and also for export.
‘Aside from construction, Mayur’s lower cost, locally produced cement could also be used to build higher quality and longer lasting concrete roads in PNG while large volumes of quicklime are currently imported for road stabilisation and by the gold mining industry for metal recovery,’ said Mayur Managing Director, Paul Mulder, in a statement.
Mayur Resources’ Paul Mulder
Mulder said construction bids had already been received for the project, which is based some 25 km north-west of Port Moresby.
Diversifying
‘In these challenging times, any new project that can diversify our economy, drastically reduce costs, improve supply chain reliability for PNG as a nation, and bring in an additional source of mining/manufacturing export revenue will be most welcome by the PNG Government,’ said a statement by PNG’s Mining Minister, Johnson Tuke.
‘We will now work with Mayur on the project’s Memorandum of Understanding to capture the commitments already made to ensure landholders are involved in construction and operations and project contributions go towards improving the living standards of landholders.’
According to Mayur Resources, the project has a target annual Phase 1 production of 1.65 million tonnes of cement/clinker and initially 200,000t of quicklime. The developers expect the project to create 360 ‘new direct permanent jobs’.
Location of the project in EL2303. Credit: Mayur Resources
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I believe that the project will include a road connecting the Project Site to Port Moresby?
The Mayur Resource Lime Project is like the PNG LNG Project. The promise of all the goodies and nothing comes in years. The advice of billions to be made, job opportunities, royalties, etc etc but nothing comes till after years, and when you final get something its far less compared to the destruction made to the landowners customary land, and before they know its their customary land that is taken away from them and the lime project is unprofitable.