In a comprehensive update, the company also outlined that approvals for its Mongolian-compliant Ovoot Feasibility Study updated with the OEDP PFS results were also expected shortly from the same Government agency.

These milestones form the technical basis for all other project permitting and enable Aspire to commence the related environmental studies.

The company has also initiated community engagement and public consultation works as part of the wider environmental and social impact studies and project management plans.

Critically, community stakeholders have combined the Erdenet to Ovoot haul road construction as part of the OEDP mine development works in their broader considerations for support of the project.

Given these developments, Aspire revealed that the OEDP DFS is now expected to hit the streets by the end of 2019 and that it was still on track for the first production of washed coking coal in the first half of 2021.

The company has also entered into a Cooperation Agreement with Ulaanbaatar Tumur Zam Joint Stock Company, or “UBTZ”, who is the operator of the Trans Mongolian rail network, which will guarantee rail capacity for Aspire’s OEDP coal transportation to the Mongolian-China border, 1,500km to the southeast.

Supporting this development, company management recently visited several coal handling and preparation plants in China, which outlined some efficient and low water and power consuming options to treat its Ovoot products.

Aspire has also met with the Mongolian Government owners of the large Tavan Tolgoi coking and thermal coal deposits in the southern part of the country, where synergies may exist for the blending of Tavan’s non-coking coal resources with Ovoot’s premium coking coals.

Preliminary work showed that an attractive value adding opportunity exists for combining the products from both deposits, which will also benefit from a recent initiative to construct a rail line from Tavan Tolgoi to an existing railhead at Sainshand to the east northeast.

The beauty is that Aspire’s Ovoot coal products will travel through Sainshand on route to China, which makes the small city an ideal location for blending of the future coal products from the separate mines, where an industrial park development has been touted.

During April, Aspire said that Chinese State-owned enterprise China Gezhouba Group had provided a Letter of Interest to construct the critical haul road that will link the OEDP to an existing railhead at Erdenet.

The main objectives of this Range States Meeting are

to discuss and review the findings of the above-mentioned study, and to develop a set of recommendations to promote transboundary conservation in those areas,
to review implementation of the current Programme of Work 2014-2020; and
to develop and agree on a new Programme of Work for CAMI covering the period 2020-2026 and update Resolution 11.24 for submission to CMS CoP13 which will take place in February 2020 in India.
The meeting is jointly organised by the CMS Secretariat, the Mongolian Government, the International Academy for Nature Conservation of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN INA) as well as the Michael Succow Foundation with funding from the German Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).

“Growth is going to continue to come from China for the next 20, 30, maybe 40 years ... The greatest growth opportunity in the world is the Belt and Road Initiative,” Stephen Perry, chairman of the 48 Group Club, was cited as saying by China Daily. Perry made a keynote speech at the forum which was organized by London Business School.

“What China is trying to do is to free the productive capacity and consumer demand from China, across Central Asia, central Europe, and down into Africa,” he said, adding it is in the United Kingdom's interests to take part in the initiative.

Participants of the forum discussed key developments of the Chinese and European economies, including Italy joining the BRI. They also talked about trade deals and innovative business practices between China and Europe.

China’s BRI megaproject (dubbed the new Silk Road), which was announced six years ago by President Xi Jinping, covers 152 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. It is expected to significantly boost global trade, and cut trading costs by half for the countries involved.

The International Monetary Fund has recently called the trade route a “very important contribution” to the global economy, saying that it promotes regional cooperation and connectivity in trade investment, human mobility, and finance.

The total length of the Tavantolgoi-Zuunbayan railroad is 414.6 km and the opening was held at its 290th km checkpoint. From this point, the first 50 km railway in the Tsogttsetsii direction of Umnugovi province construction will be situated, said the Chief Executive Officer of the Mongolian Railways SOE.

However, due to the increased traffic pressure caused by the Tavantolgoi railroad, it is necessary to reform the Sainshand-Zuunbayan 47 km railroad. According to the development plan, it will start its maintenance next year. Ulaanbaatar Railway JV will fund the required MNT 37.7 billion of the construction.

The groundbreaking ceremony of the Tavantolgoi-Zuunbayan railway that will be built under the “State railway policy” in Mandakh soum, Dornogobi province took place on Friday. President of Mongolia emphasized at the ceremony, “In this land-locked country, this infrastructure is important to the economy. Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi JSC is investing in this project from its profits of 2018. This investment is not a foreign project, it is our income earned without a burden on foreign workers. This is what we are giving to ourselves.”

Zuunbayan is a village in Dornogovi province and is one of Sainshand soum's administrative districts. Currently, more than 3,000 people live in the area. It is expected that the population will grow 2-3 times and will become a major settlement center when the railway is completed.

A total of 11 parties have registered to participate in the by-election in Khentii Province, which will be held on 30 June. Before this, all parties must submit their nominations to the General Election Commission.

The previous incumbent, D.Gantulga from the Mongolian People’s Party, won his seat in the State Great Khural from the 42nd parliamentary district in June 2016. However, he was accused of raping a 25-year-old female student at her home in June 2017. D.Gantulga denied the accusation saying that everything was consensual and the rape allegation was ‘politically’ motivated. Nevertheless, he tended his resignation in 2018.

Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif are currently on a promotional spree, which is attracting media attention. Currently, there are several Bollywood films being made on historical events and personalities; when he was asked – do you have any character that you would like to portray on the silver screen? Salman Khan responded saying that if he ever gets to play a historical role he would love to play the role of Chinggis Khaan.

Temuujin or Chinggis Khaan was the founder and Great Khaan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death. After founding the Empire and being proclaimed “Chinggis Khaan”, he launched the Mongol invasions that conquered most of Eurasia. By the end of his life, the Mongol Empire occupied a substantial portion of Central Asia and China.

Mr.Iitsuka Akio noted that they aim to further develop partnership in the frameworks of the visit as Mongolia has worked in partnership with the Ibaraki prefecture for 20 years. He then highlighted that the citizens of the two countries have crucial roles in further developing the partnership.

Deputy Speaker of the State Great Khural and Deputy Head of the Mongolia-Japan parliamentary group L.Enkh-Amgalan expressed his satisfaction of the development of relations and partnership in all sectors with Japan, and noted the financial assistance and support that was given by the Government of Japan in times of difficulty during the transition into a market economy in 1990. He then offered his congratulations on the accession of Prince Naruhito, beginning the Reiwa era. During the meeting, he underlined the importance of developing partnership between the citizens’ representative councils and governor’s offices of prefectures and aimags.

The two sides underlined the high significance of the economic partnership agreement between the two countries, which has been effective since 2016, further developing partnership in trades and economy and increasing trade turnover. They also highlighted successful implementation of the project to prepare Mongolian engineers to develop the sectors of agriculture, tourism and IT with 400 students being involved in the programme to prepare 1,000 Mongolian engineers so far.

Deputy Speaker L.Enkh-Amgalan then asked about the Prefectural Assembly of the Ibaraki Prefecture’s Japan-Mongolia friendship group’s policy on the workforce to be sent to Japan from Mongolia.

He said, “As our country’s working age population is 1.3 million, we tend to prefer our youth to work in knowledge industries. The youth needs to be prepared for the new industrial sectors especially. Previous experiences have shown the need of various issues, such as family relationships, health insurance and social insurance fees, to be solved comprehensively. I am confident that the time when Mongolia “exports” skilled engineers to foreign countries is close.”

On the supply side, Fitch expects production misses from Australia to keep the market tight in the coming quarters as large diversified miners lose their appetite for mining coal.

Although Fitch analysts are more positive on coking coal prices in the coming quarters than they were one year ago, they maintain the view that prices will ease in the long-term as the Chinese steel sector resumes its slowdown and the demand for Australian coking coal softens.

With the re-escalation of the trade war between China and the US, the Chinese government will most likely be prone to providing further economic support to domestic industries, especially the infrastructure sector, which would buoy steel production and ultimately coking coal demand, Fitch predicts.

Indicators show that, while the largest importer of Australian coking coal, India, saw a 11.7% y-o-y decline in coking coal imports from Australia in Q119, China, the second largest importer of Australian coking coal, increased imports by 35% y-o-y in the same period.

Long-term outlook 
Beyond 2020, Fitch expects Australian coking coal prices to continue on a multi-year downtrend, driven largely by a resumption in the slowdown of the Chinese steel sector and environmental concerns limiting coal imports.

Production outlook 
Fitch forecasts that China will maintain its dominance in the producers' market for coking coal, with absolute coking coal production increasing from 536mnt in 2019 to 551mnt by 2028, with production in 2028 being triple that of the second-largest producer, Australia (184mnt).

In 2026, analysts predict that Russia will surpass Indonesia as the third largest coking coal producer in the world, and that over the years, China, Australia and Indonesia will slowly lose the global market share of coking coal production to Russia, India and Mongolia.

Earth’s inner heat continuously melts and changes the chemistry of the planet’s crust, and this makes it difficult for scientists to find samples of Earth’s early chemistry. Richard Carlson at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC and Dmitri Ionov at the University of Montpellier in France scoured Mongolia’s Tariat region and found rocks studded with unusual-looking fragments known as xenoliths.

Chemical analysis of 97 xenoliths shows that they were born beneath the Mongolian crust. The xenoliths are similar in composition to material that, when melted, produces the lava that erupts from seafloor features called mid-ocean ridges. Together these ridges form Earth’s biggest volcanic chain.

This similarity suggests that the Mongolian rocks are a remarkably pristine sample of the large portion of Earth’s interior that melts to feed the mid-ocean ridges, the authors say. The motion of plates of Earth’s crust likely shoved the xenolith source beneath Mongolia hundreds of millions of years ago.