Saudi Arabia and Sudan plan to produce within three years gold, silver and copper in large quantities from 2,000 meters below sea level of the Red Sea. The project has been in the planning stage for almost four decades, a senior Sudanese official said. A German firm first analyzed in the seventies the Atlantis II basin which is located roughly half way between the port city of Jeddah and Port Sudan, the biggest port on the African country. Using that data, both countries - which agreed long ago to jointly explore the potential of the Red Sea - now plan to start production in 2014 using special drill ships, said Abbas Al-Sheikh, undersecretary in the Sudanese mining ministry. Sudan will explore the basin with Saudi firm Manafa International which has formed a joint-venture with Canadian firm Diamond Fields International for the task. "It's a lot," Sheikh told Reuters Sunday on the sidelines of an industry conference in Port Sudan when asked how much both countries planned to produce from there. Based on past estimates, the basin stretching some 60 square kilometers contains 47 tons of gold, 3,750 tons of silver, 1.89 million tons of Zinc plus around 425,000 tons of copper, a Sudanese ministry study says. The rock in the basin "indicates that sediments in some parts of the Atlantis basin may attain a total thickness of up to 160 meters," Diamond Fields says on its website. Sheikh declined to say how much the project would cost, saying only it had now become viable after gold and copper prices haven risen strongly: "It is very costly...but now gold and copper prices are high. It's expensive." Industry experts said processing the minerals at a plant would cost $200 million or more. "There are significant technological challenges," said Tucker Barrie, a Canadian mining consultant attending the conference. The operation would need around 200 workers on rotation on sea plus 300-500 people working on land at a metallurgy plant. Barrie said copper would be the most interesting mineral to extract from the deep-water basin: "Copper is the most value resource....from the size it is all copper." Building a copper smelter to process the minerals would cost around $2 billion which would make sense instead of taking the copper somewhere else for processing.
