Afghanistan will soon open up a potentially world-class copper deposit for foreign investment, Minister of Mines Ibrahim Adel said, adding that the largely unexplored country has huge potential for a range of minerals.
The copper deposit at Aynak, 30 km (20 miles) south of the capital, Kabul, has been mined for 2,000 years and is believed to contain a stratabound ore deposit of 240 million tonnes at a grade of 2.3 percent copper.
"Exploration work for gas and oil is around 20 percent that we have explored, maybe less than 20 percent," Adel told Reuters in an interview late on Sunday.
"For minerals, it is less than 5 percent. That means that more than 95 percent of our deposits are not explored yet."
Adel said a US consulting company had been hired to prepare tender documents for the Aynak copper deposit. It was hoped bidding could take place in six months.
The British Geological Survey has been going through and translating records from 15 years of work on the mine by Soviet geologists in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Afghanistan Geological Survey was located on one of Kabul's front lines during years of civil war in the 1990s when the building was largely demolished and its sample collection was pilfered and strewn about.
But most of the Russian documents miraculously survived.
"Despite all the trouble through the civil war and afterwards, they've managed to keep most of their records," said Stan Coats of the British Geological Survey, who has been helping the Afghan survey.
"Some people took them home and looked after them there and then brought then back after the troubles were over," Coats said.
The Aynak mine area became an al Qaeda militant training camp in the 1990s and the core samples the Russians drilled got mixed up when the wooden boxes they were stored in were broken up for firewood.
Not knowing which drill hole a core comes from makes it virtually useless, Coats said.
Adel said the Ministry of Mines would negotiate royalties and seek surface rent from the successful bidder, while the Ministry of Finance would seek some taxes such as income tax and customs duty, but that would be it. "We don't ask for any more," Adel said.
Aynak is in Logar province, which is not known as a hotspot for Taleban insurgents, who are largely confined to areas to the south and east, although security analysts say it is not completely safe.
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