Description

Nigeria is blessed with abundant mineral resources, which are from time immemorial formed the backbone of the nation’s economic and industrial development aspirations. Prior to independence, the nation’s mineral raw material resources contributed immensely to the export earnings of the nation.

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 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 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 metallic minerals, which are vital to the industrial take off of the country, have been found in commercial quantities within the country.
They include lead, zinc, tantalite, tin and columbite ore.

This report seeks to examine the financial viability or otherwise of establishing a columbite milling plant in Nigeria which involves the sourcing, milling and packaging of columbite ore. Coltan or Columbite Tantalite is used primarily for the production of tantalum capacitors, used in many electronic devices.

It is also used in high temperature alloys for air and land based turbines. The upsurge in electronic products over the past decade resulted in a peak in late 2000 with inflated high demand and price increases for the mineral which lasted a few months. In 2005 the price was still down at early 2000 levels.

The demand for milled columbite 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 hours.