TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, November 23. Uzbekistan plans to start operating a new coal mine with 900,000 tons of reserves at the Shargun deposit in its Surkhandarya region, Trend reports.
This was revealed during the visit of President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev to Uzbekneftegaz’s headquarters office in Tashkent.
The region's extraction operations total 541,000 tons as of today. Uzbekistan intends to enhance coal extraction in the region by 2 million tons in reaction to this discovery.
Meanwhile, between January and September 2023, Uzbekistan extracted 4.46 million tons of coal.
According to Uzbekistan's State Statistics Committee, the recorded figure represents a 14.5 percent rise, or 563,700 tons, over the same period previous year, when Uzbekistan mined 3.8 million tons of coal.
Large firms in Uzbekistan mined 685,600 tons of coal in September 2023 alone, accounting for 15.3 percent of the total volume produced since the start of 2023.
Moreover, the country plans to increase the overall coal production to 6.5 million tons by the end of 2023, which is 22.6 percent more than the volume extracted in 2022.
