Venezuela promotes mining campaign, power fix

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has made another push to promote mining investment and named a new electricity minister tasked with repairing the power grid.

Speaking from the presidential palace yesterday, Maduro announced a 2019-24 national mining plan aimed at establishing "win-win" joint ventures offering foreign investors "legal and constitutional" guarantees to develop some 13 minerals, including coltan, nickel, gold, diamonds, phosphates, iron ore and coal.

"Mining is the future alternative to oil," Maduro said during the national broadcast. He was flanked by executive vice president Delcy Rodriguez and ecological mining minister Victor Cano.

"These minerals belong to Venezuela, not to the coup-mongering opposition. We are going to develop this with a concept of sovereignty and wealth generation," Maduro said, alluding to the political opposition led by national assembly president Juan Guaido.

During the broadcast, Maduro patched in live reports from small mining and minerals processing projects. He announced the launch of operations of a small coltan processing plant dubbed Las Bendiciones in Cedeno municipality in Bolivar state. The €2.8mn ($3.2mn) project is a joint venture between state-owned heavy industries company CVG, the military´s oil, gas and mining company Camimpeg and the private company Minverca. It will process 20 t per year of pre-concentrated coltan to supply a metals separation plant in Ciudad Piar, according to mining vice minister Franklin Ramirez, who addressed Maduro from the construction site.

"We are going to be the world´s top supplier of coltan," Cano said, pledging that Venezuela will produce 35,000 t/yr of the strategic metal.

Maduro also showcased a new coal mine dubbed Las Lajitas in Aragua state. According to private Venezuelan executives speaking from the site, the €71mn project is in the exploration phase but the mine is expected to produce 1mn t/yr of coal, first to supply the Dutch-led Lomas de Niquel slag-to-nickel project, with the rest to be exported at market prices.

Maduro next touted the €18.9mn Monte Fresco phosphates mine in the western state of Tachira. According to Nicolas Varela, representative of the private company Venezolana de Fosfato (Venfoca), the project will produce 70,000 t of phosphates in the first year, with 30,000 t of that to be allocated to state-owned petrochemicals company Pequiven. He did not say when production would begin.

Maduro has so far defied a US-led campaign to unseat him in favor of Guaido, whom more than 50 countries recognize as Venezuela´s interim president. During the broadcast, he referred to US sanctions that have targeted the country´s oil industry since January, and vowed to prevent them from blocking future minerals exports.

In a separate announcement this morning, Maduro named Freddy Brito as the country´s new electricity minister and chief executive of state-owned power utility Corpoelec.

Most of Venezuela still lacks steady power supply in the wake of a string of nationwide blackouts in March and early April, and the oil-based economy has mostly collapsed.

Brito replaces Igor Gavidia who served as a minister for a brief period after the blackouts.

He previously served as minister of science and technology.