The Zhambyl region in the south of Kazakhstan with its capital in Taraz has in recent years begun reclaiming its fame as one of the most powerful industrial regions.
By 2015, the capacity of the Taraz Metallurgic Plant will increase threefold, reaching 300,000 tons per year.
The plant first opened on July 11, 2007, when Prime Minister Karim Massimov personally launched furnace No. 5, fulfilling President Nazarbayev’s initiative to create an electrometallurgical production on the basis of idling LLP Khimprom 2030.
Soon after, a new project to redesign Khimprom 2030 to the production of ferroalloys, electric calcium anthracite, cathode blocks and anode paste, as well as a plan to organise a steelmaking production were recommended for the 30 Corporate Leaders state programme. More than $127 million was planned to be invested in the diversification and conversion of the facility.
In 2008, it became the first plant in the world to produce manganese ore pellets. This was a special event for the economy and ecology of Kazakhstan, because its industrial waste dumps today contain millions of tons of manganese and coal.
Responding to the president’s instructions to create a resource base, the Central Asian Investment Consulting Company, which bought out Khimprom from Kazphosphate, created a joint venture with the Sary-Arka Social Entrepreneurial Company for the development and production of manganese ore on the Tuyebay-Syrtysu site, a Karaganda field whose probable reserves are estimated at 30 million tons of ore. They also began to develop the West Kamys deposit, which means another 5-6 thousand tons per month in production.
Another important component of the project, steelmaking and rolling production, was launched in the Zhambyl oblast. Its capacity is 15,000 tons of products annually. Domestically manufactured bars, previously bought abroad, are now supplied to metallurgists in Karaganda, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Temirtau, Pavlodar, Aktobe and Aksu regions.
Commercial production of electric calcium anthracite (4,000 tons per month) for Russian aluminum plants was organised at the electrode mass workshop.
On June 8, 2011, the new ore-thermal furnace number 4 produced its first products. Now, four furnaces could annually manufacture more than 100 tons of ferroalloys. But progressing steel mills of Chelyabinsk, Novokuznetsk, Serov, Revda, as well as enterprises of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania where the plant exports the lion share of its output need more quality products, and therefore the plant continued to build new furnaces, which will allow in two years bring the manufacture of ferroalloys to 300,000 tons per year. And it means hundreds of new jobs and solid contributions to the budget.
