About 6 billion tons of minerals have been added to the country's proven reserves as a result of new explorations, announced the head of Iranian Mines and Mining Industries Development and Renovation Organization on the sidelines of the second training workshop for Economic Cooperation Organization experts on processing iron ore and base metals.
Mehdi Karbasian added that several other exploration projects covering a 200,000-square-kilometer of the country's area will come to fruition in the second half of the current Iranian year (started March 21, 2015).
"By expanding mineral exploration projects, we can double the country's 57 billion tons of proven reserves, since previous explorations only covered about 7% of the country's geographical area," IRNA quoted Karbasian as saying.
He pointed to ECO members' potential in the mining sector and said IMIDRO is cooperating closely with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan in mineral exploration projects and is also negotiating with Australia and South Africa to use their expertise in this sector.
ECO countries' mineral experts visited Tehran for a two-day training course on processing iron ore and base metals in IMIDRO's mineral processing research center on Tuesday.
According to the 30th edition of World Mining Data annually published by Austria's Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy in 2015, Iran ranked first among the 10 members of Economic Cooperation Organization in terms of annual mineral production and ranks 10th globally with more than 348.3 million tons of minerals worth $162.3 billion produced in 2013.
Total global mineral production in 2013 was about 17.2 billion tons worth $5,433 billion, while the 10 members of ECO (Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) produced about 956.1 million tons of minerals worth $388.9 billion.
