Korea has been called a treasure trove since olden times.

The DPRK has rich deposits of minerals and industrial raw material and fuel resources including iron ore, gold, silver, lead, zinc, magnesite, limestone, agalmatolite, kaolin, anthracite and lignite.

Among them, magnesite is globally outstanding in terms of deposits and grade.

According to surveys, it is mainly distributed in North and South Hamgyong provinces in the northeastern part of the country and its deposits amount to billions of tons, taking a large share in the world’s magnesite deposits.

Nearly 90 percent of the total deposits are in the Tanchon area of South Hamgyong Province. A high-grade magnesite field stretches from ground to deep into the underground. Fascinated by the inexhaustible ore body, foreign experts admire the place which is home to large-scale mining bases, namely the Taehung Youth Hero Mine and the Ryongyang Mine.

President Kim Il Sung visited the Ryongyang Mine in April 1961 and named the mountain with rich magnesite deposits Mt Paekkum (white gold), saying the mountains in this area are all “gold mountains”. Since then, magnesite has been likened to “white gold” by the locals.

As the large open-air mines built on a huge magnesite mineral mass, the Taehung Youth Hero Mine and the Ryongyang Mine have large-scale stopes, open-air and underground.

The mines annually extract millions of tons of minerals by using large mining facilities. The “flourishing mines” have good prospect in light of production capacity.

There are the Tanchon Magnesia Factory and other magnesite processing bases in the Tanchon area.

The Tanchon Magnesia Factory is the nation’s powerful refractory producer.

It turns out dozens of kinds of quality magnesia products, especially magnesia clinker, light burned magnesia and electrocast magnesia clinker.

In the past, the factory laid a solid foundation for qualitatively and quantitatively producing products that are highly demanded in the international market by making the fuel based on locally-abundant anthracite Juche-oriented. It also set up an atypical refractory process that relies on domestic raw materials to produce different kinds of quality atypical fireproof materials conducive to increasing the durability of metallurgical and heating furnaces and improving lining execution remarkably.

It now flexibly changes the grade of products and the production structure based on grain size in keeping with the fluctuations in the world market. It also pushes the second- and third-stage processing.

The area has also Tanchon Port with millions of tons of cargo throughput. The demand for magnesia products is on the rise at home and abroad.

By Jong Hwa Sun PT