admin
Business Reporter
Zimbabwe‘s largest ferrochrome producer, Zimasco has started scouting for a private company to process 40 000 metric tonnes of chrome ore fines currently stockpiled at its Kwekwe smelter plant.
According to Zimasco, the winning company must have technical expertise and must construct a plant and operate at its own expense at the smelter to produce high grade concentrates.
Interested companies must have capacity to produce a minimum production rate of 5 000 tonnes per month as the ferrochrome giant warms up to the recent lifting of the ban on all chrome ore exports.
“Zimasco Pvt Limited has a 40 000 metric tonne chrome ore fines at its Kwekwe smelter plant that it is seeking to process and upgrade to chrome concentrates.
“Zimasco is inviting suitably qualified companies to tender for the toll processing of these fines through a suitable plant that the tendering company will with minimum Cr2O3 grade of 48 percent at a minimum production rate of 5 000 tonnes per month,” said Zimasco in a statement.
Zimasco, since December last year, scaled down its ferrochrome smelting operation to 40 percent of capacity due to the prevailing low market prices for ferrochrome on the global market.
After earlier announcing an increase in production at the beginning of 2014 to 97,5 percent from 40 percent owing to an improvement in the operating environment, the production matrix however, changed towards the end of the same year as low global prices took effect.
During the beginning of 2015, Zimasco announced a partnership with a Chinese firm, Jilin Houyuan Limited in a deal that was expected to lead to the construction of a sinter plant in Kwekwe.
A sintering plant is a plant used in the per-treatment step in the production of iron, where fine particles of iron ores, coke, flues , lime stone and dolomite are combined by combustion to produce sinter.
Production of lumpy chromite ore at the company’s operations has been adequate to supply two furnaces running and this saw the ferrochrome mining giant leaving the sintering plant idle.
Zimasco has also been stock piling slag produced from smelting operations from the time the plant started operating in 1962 and the stock piled slag is estimated to be around eight million tonnes.
Zimasco and ZimAlloys are the two biggest producers of ferrochrome in Zimbabwe.
Zimasco has an installed capacity of around 180 000 tonnes.
Zimbabwe and South Africa hold about 90 percent of the world’s chromite reserves and resources, according to a US Geological Survey.
Online Reporter