“A-Steel” is stocking up on ore

The structure of Albert Avdolyan “A-Steel” received five licenses for the exploration of iron ore in the Khabarovsk Territory. According to the representative of the businessman, in the future, on the basis of these assets and the Elga coal deposit, it is possible to build a coke-chemical and metallurgical plant. The market prospects of these enterprises can only be associated with exports to Asia, where the products of the steel plant will have to compete with cheap Chinese steel.

The structures of Albert Avdolyan and partners plan to build a coking plant and a metallurgical plant in the Far East, a representative of the businessman told Kommersant. The resource base for the plants should be iron ore deposits in the Khabarovsk Territory and the Elga coal deposit. So, the A-Steel company, in which 75% belongs to Albert Avdolyan, and 25% to Alexander Isaev, in September of this year received five licenses for prospecting and evaluating iron ore deposits in the Khabarovsk Territory, follows from SPARK-Interfax data. . In the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the production of iron, steel and ferroalloys is indicated as the areas of activity of A-Steel, but there are no active assets yet.

According to Kommersant’s interlocutor, two inclined wells with a depth of 350 m were drilled on licenses in the Khabarovsk Territory, and a positive result was obtained for the presence of an ore body. “According to our optimistic forecasts, we estimate iron ore reserves at 5 billion tons. The iron ore deposits themselves are located in the area of ​​the village of Chumikan. The totality of these facts and the logistically convenient location of our Elga coal deposit, rich in coking coal, certainly suggests the construction of a coke plant and a metallurgical plant for the production of steel in this region in the future,” he said.

Chumikan, located on the coast of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk, should become the end point of a new private railway from the Elga deposit, which should allow the export of local coal bypassing the BAM. The road is planned to be put into operation in the first quarter of 2025, its cost was estimated at 137 billion rubles. In 2022, it is planned to mine and ship 20 million tons of coal from the Elga, and in 2023 to reach production of 45 million tons.

Metallurgical assets in the north of the Khabarovsk Territory are doomed to be export-oriented, since there is not enough demand for them in the Russian Far East. The Amurstal plant is already operating in the Khabarovsk Territory, which supplies most of its products to the domestic market, and steel billets to China and the countries of Southeast Asia. In Primorsky Krai, Rosneft and Gazprombank are going to build a metallurgical plant with a capacity of 1.5 million tons of steel to supply the Zvezda shipyard. The shipyard is expected to consume 330-350 thousand tons per year.

The competitive advantage of the new plant may be a short transport distance to Asian markets. Large Russian metallurgists are now losing profitability when reorienting exports to Asia through the Eastern range. Before the sanctions, the route from the plant to the ports of the North-West or the South of the Russian Federation was about 1.5 thousand km, and to the Far Eastern ports one has to travel 9 thousand km along the overcrowded Eastern test site.

Sergei Grishunin from the NRA notes that it is too early to talk about the construction of a coke and steel plant, as well as about the availability of a resource base for iron ore. There is currently no recalculation to industrial reserves, he notes. However, if the plans are implemented, Primorsky Metallurgical Plant could become a potential consumer of coke and iron ore concentrate. The second option would be to export coke to India and iron ore to India and China. If A-Steel decides to build a metallurgical plant, then the sale of rolled products is possible only in foreign markets, which are dominated by cheap products from China.

Evgeny Zainullin