Zimbabwe’s biggest chrome producer, the Zimbabwe Mining & Smelting Company (Zimasco), and China’s Jilin Houyuan have signed a deal that will see the latter investing $250-million in a ferrochrome sintering plant in the town of Kwekwe.
Zimbabwe public relations officer Clara Sadomba says the deal was facilitated by Chinese steel producer Sinosteel, which is now the principal shareholder, with a 73% stake.
“Through the assistance of our major shareholder, we have managed to secure Chinese partner Jilin Houyuan, which is going to raise funding for the construction of a multimillion-dollar sintering plant in Kwekwe. Jilin Houyuan will do the sintering process, while Zimasco will pay for the sintered ore.”
The sintering process involves combining ferrochrome fines and cutting them down to sizes that can be fed into a blast furnace.
Sadomba says the company has also signed an agreement for the construction of a high-technology slag gravity separation plant with Chinese company Golden Horizon.
The company intends to use the new plant to recover an esti- mated 4% of ferrochrome alloys stuck in nearly ten-million tons of slag stockpiled at Zimasco’s Kwekwe factory dumps. “We used to have our own alloy from the slag plant but the plant has been closed. It was no longer effective and required new technology.
The slag gravity separation plant will be commissioning next month. The company’s factory plant has an installed production capacity of 180 000 t/y of ferrochrome.