Description

For over three decades, the Country has continued to depend entirely on oil for her revenue and the volatile nature of the oil market has made it imperative for us to diversify the mono-product economy through exploitation and processing of our abundant solid mineral resources. The clamour for resource control being advocated by states with petroleum resources in their domain makes it imperative for us to develop, exploit, process and utilize our solid minerals – particularly Non-metallic Minerals as every part of this country is blessed with one or more solid mineral that could yield substantial revenue for sustainable development.

Exploitation of the Non-metallic Minerals has not attained the desired level, mainly because of the various constraints associated with their exploitation, development and processing for utilization. Many of the non-metallic minerals, which are vital to the industrial take off of the country, have been found in commercial quantities within the country.

They include limestone, dolomite, marble, kaolin, barite, diatomite, feldspar, quartz and silica sands, gypsum, talc, silimanite, kyanite, phosphate, salt and bentonite.

This report seeks to examine the financial viability or otherwise of establishing limestone/ marble milling plant in Nigeria which involves the sourcing, milling and packaging. The milled limestone/marble is suitable for the production of cement, fluxing material, powder filler for paper, rubber, paint, glass, ceramics, pharmaceutical, quicklime, hydrated lime and calcium carbonate.

The demand for milled limestone/marble is quite high in Nigeria and the raw material is also available in commercial quantity.

The production capacity of the proposed milling plant is one and half {1.5} tons per hour.