Jakarta (ANTARA) - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) affirmed that the new state-run tin mining corporation PT Timah Tbk’s smelter demonstrated the government's seriousness in downstreaming the tin mining process.
“(Downstreaming of) nickel already (has been conducted, and now, it is time for downstreaming) tin (and) bauxite," the president stated at the construction site of the Top Submerged Lance (TSL) smelter of PT Timah Tbk in Central Bangka District, Bangka Belitung Province, on Thursday.
The company’s ore processing and refining facility is planned to be completed in November 2022.
"We expect that the downstreaming for tin will soon be conducted, the same as we have done for nickel. However, we have not projected when we will stop exporting raw tin," the president noted.
The president said the government needs to comprehensively calculate and plan the halt of raw tin exports to ensure that the process will run smoothly.
“Later, when the calculation is completed, I will announce the stop (of raw tin exports), maybe next year -- or even this year,” he remarked.
Jokowi noted that the preparedness of all tin mining state-owned companies as well as domestic private enterprises to conduct downstreaming should be taken into account before halting the export activity.
"All (raw resources should) undergo industrial downstreaming since there is an added value (in the downstreaming)," he noted.
Hence, the president expected that industrial downstreaming will also open as many new job opportunities as possible.
The PT Timah Tbk's TSL smelter has been constructed since 2019. Currently, the progress in the construction of the project has reached around 97.33 percent.
The cost of building the new smelter, which has a capacity of 40 thousand tons of crude tin per year, reaches around US$80 million, or equivalent to Rp1.2 trillion.
The smelting process using the TSL smelter will become faster, with an efficiency of 25-34 percent as compared to the existing smelters.
PT Timah's tin ore production in the first semester of 2022 was recorded at 9,901 metric tons (MT), while the tin production during the same period last year reached 8,805 MT.
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