ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 1. The Ministry of Energy of Kazakhstan has launched a targeted initiative to modernize the national coal industry by shifting resources toward chemical processing and downstream manufacturing, Trend reports via the ministry.
According to the ministry, six distinct industrial projects are at various stages of implementation and assessment to utilize the country's extensive coal reserves for synthetic fuel and metallurgical inputs.
In the construction phase, a plant with an annual capacity of one million tons of metallurgical coke is currently being built in the Karaganda region, a project expected to create 500 permanent jobs. Additionally, two facilities designed to produce synthetic diesel fuel from coal are under development in the Pavlodar and Karaganda regions, with each plant carrying a rated output capacity of 100,000 tons per year.
Three secondary projects remain in the preliminary planning and site-selection stages. These include a coke-chemical downstream facility in the Karaganda region for processing coal tar, extracting benzene, and purifying coke-oven gas; an agrochemical plant in the Abay region for the production of ammonia and urea; and a specialized facility to convert raw coal into synthetic gas, which is currently undergoing location assessments.
