LABORATORY TO BE SET UP TO MONITOR MINERAL CONCENTRATES

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ A monitoring laboratory will be established to control concentrates of copper and gold that are to be extracted from the Oyu tolgoi mine and exported to foreign countries. This decision was made at the cabinet meeting last Saturday. The laboratory will be erected at the "Geological Central Laboratory" state-owned institution, with functions to make analysis, to monitor samples, and to run other tests. Fully equipped with the latest hi tech, the lab will be built in a special house, and the cabinet considers that this will economize the state budget and let avoid founding another new lab with duplicated services. In order to put the strategically important copper-and-gold Oyu tolgoi mine into the economic circulation, the government established the OT investment agreement in October of 2009, and it came into force in March of 2010. Following it, another agreement on temporary power purchase was established late 2012 with China to provide the mine with power, therefore the OT is able to export copper concentrate from the first half of this year. In conjunction with launching the copper concentrate export, the monitoring lab is required to monitor samples of copper and gold concentrates and to determine contents of the minerals, their evaluations and monitoring confirmations. Furthermore, it will enable to control the export size of the concentrates and to calculate the revenue from the export, expenses and dividends. B.Khuder