By Ros Sothea, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
Editor’s note: Richard Thompson is an international mining expert from the United Kingdom who has been working in the mining sector for more than 40 years. Within the last 10 years, Thompson has been conducting research on mining resources in Cambodia for the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. He spoke to VOA Khmer recently in Phnom Penh, weighing in on the country’s mining industry, the mining market and the benefits that can come from mineral extraction.
Q. Cambodia’s government expects to see a third of 20 licensed companies begin mining extraction in 2015. Is this a realistic timeline?
A. The possibility of getting mineral resources during the next five years will depend entirely upon the market of those mineral resources. Although the 20 companies, or the third of those companies, expect to begin mineral extraction, if the market value of their product decreases, they won’t have a market and therefore they are not likely to begin extraction. Besides that, there are still many requirements of the company in terms of legislation that needs to be fulfilled for a good mining industry to emerge. So it is impossible to tell at this stage whether the third of the companies be able to achieve this.
Q. Based on your 10 years of research, can you weigh the potential of the country’s mining resources?
A. As there hasn’t been extensive exploration, nobody is quite sure what is here. It’s going to take several more years to probably evaluate the potential of deposits, because with a proper mine you really need a very intensive drilling program, maybe several thousand or a few tens of thousand of meters of drilling to establish the shape, the size, the depth and the stretch before the amount of deposited metal can be calculated. And then the economic study can be made to see if there are enough mining deposits. This is not a profitable exercise. They take the risk, they choose to spend their money, and the profit comes when they eventually find something worthwhile, or economically useful.
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