10 October 2008
Maputo — The Brazilian mining giant, the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), expects to start exporting coal from its concession at Moatize, in the western Mozambican province of Tete, in late 2010 or 2011.
Speaking to reporters on Friday after an audience in Maputo with President Armando Guebuza, the CVRD chairperson, Roger Agnelli, said the company hoped to reach, within a few years, annual coal production at Moatize of 40 million tonnes.
He said that this year alone, CVRD has invested 130 million US dollars in Mozambique. Added to the capital invested in previous years, the total CVRD investment in Moatize now amounts to over 250 million dollars.
CVRD won the concession in 2004, and immediately paid 122.8 million dollars for it. The CVRD concession is for 25 years, and the area concerned contain estimated reserves of 2.5 billion tonnes of coal.
Agnelli praised the support that CVRD has received from the government. "The government has supported us and all the ministries are cooperating with CVRD", he said.
In particular, he had met with the Transport Ministry to discuss how to move coal exports from Moatize to Mozambican ports. The Sena rail line, which runs from Moatize to the port of Beira, a distance of over 600 kilometres, was comprehensively sabotaged by the South African backed Renamo rebels during the war of destabilisation.
The line is now under reconstruction and should be fully open to traffic as from mid-2009. But the Sena line alone cannot handle the huge amounts of coal that CVRD, and the Australian company Riversdale, which operates in the block next to the CVRD concession, have mentioned.
Alternatives under consideration include taking the coal by barge down the Zambezi, and building a new railway across southern Malawi, to link up with the line to the northern Mozambican port of Nacala.
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