JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Mongolian coal explorer Aspire Mining on Wednesday said it had signed nonbinding memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with four North Asian steel mills and other buyers for the coking coal that its Ovoot mine would produce.

The four MoUs totalled a possible commitment by Chinese customers to purchase up to 5.6-million tonnes a year of coking coal and represented nearly all the planned total saleable production from the Ovoot project’s first-stage development.

In the Chinese market, coking coal from the project fell within the clean-fat coal specification, a category that Aspire said was highly valued and in short supply in China, where it is used to blend with lower-quality, lower-caking coals to replace hard coking coals in coke batches to reduce batch costs and reliance on the seaborne traded hard coking coals.

Aspire indicated that it had also met with various other large-scale potential Chinese customers, as well as steel mills and coke producers in Japan, Russia and Eastern Europe that have indicated additional significant buying interest.

Meanwhile, Aspire had completed coke oven testwork on an indicative bulk sample from the Ovoot project that confirmed that its coking coal, if used as part of a coke-oven feed blend, could replace the use of hard coking coals and improve the caking ability of lower-quality coking coals and coke breeze, a recycled coke oven residue.

The Ovoot project’s coking coal had a high vitrinite content of 97%, which positioned it as one of the highest ISO 502:1982 Gray King coke types in the market with high fluidity and good plastic properties.

“We are very pleased with the initial interest received in Ovoot coking coal properties, given the relatively short time that preliminary marketing of the coal has been undertaken.

“It is clear that interest in North Asia is substantial and well in excess of the potential volume of sales from our first stage of development at Ovoot indicated by the nonbinding MoUs signed to date,” MD David Paull said.