Talon Petroleum (TPD) has secured an option to earn a 35 per cent interest in the proposed Gurvantes XXXV Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) in Mongolia.

The company signed the agreement with Telman Resources, which holds a coal bed methane (CBM) prospecting contract over the area of the proposed PSA. Notably, Telman has already completed initial prospecting work to help better understand the site’s potential.

Following the initial work, Telman finalised negotiations with the Mineral Resources and Petroleum Authority of Mongolia on the commercial terms of the PSA, which will now need approval from the Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industry and the Cabinet of Mongolia.

Gurvantes XXXV covers an area of 8400 square kilometres, along the Chinese-Mongolian border, in what is considered one of the most prospective basins for CBM globally.

Importantly, the future project is in an ideal place for future gas sales in Mongolia and China.

Talon already has the funds to acquire the interest and has received firm commitments from new and existing institutional and sophisticated investors to raise a minimum $4 million with $1 million accepted in oversubscription.

Once the PSA gets the green tick, work for the interest will include drilling of at least four coreholes.

"Talon is very pleased to be entering into this farm-in transaction with Telmen," Managing Director David Casey said.

"This is one of the best CBM/CSG opportunities I have seen and Gurvantes XXXV represents an exceptional opportunity for the company and its shareholders, with Talon to be at the forefront of what is an exciting emerging CBM industry in Mongolia,"he added.

Talon is up 11.1 per cent on the market this morning and is trading at 0.5 cents per share at 11:24 am AEDT.

I first saw Mongolia from the windows of a train. I was crossing Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, from Moscow to Beijing. East of the Urals, there are quite a lot of trees. By the fourth day, the Siberian forests had lulled me into a stupor. Slumped in compartment 69A, I had been hypnotised by tree trunks.

And then one morning, I woke to Mongolia. After the claustrophobic forests of Siberia, the steppes were a revelation. The train seemed to ride like a ship on waves of grass. The horizons were boundless. The skies went on forever. In all that space, there was a sudden sense of possibilities. Mongolia looked like some vast vacant lot grown wild on the edge of the world.

At first, from my train, I saw nothing — no towns, no roads, no fields, no fences, no people. Then suddenly I glimpsed a distant cluster of tents, the round white tents of Central Asia, known in Mongolia as gers, which seemed to sprout in these virginal grasslands as mysteriously as mushrooms. And then horsemen, the heirs of Genghis Khan, three of them silhouetted on a skyline as pure as a drawn line, gazing down with disinterest at the train, before wheeling and galloping away into their medieval world.

For anyone with a passing interest in nomads, Mongolia represents the zenith of pastoral culture. Here in the spacious obscurity of the Central Asian steppes, the country survives as one of the last great nomadic domains, a world of tents and migration, of horses and flocks of sheep. For me, it was love at first sight. This was a world where movement and migration were still the central facts of life.

Wish I were there . . .

Perhaps I had been reading too much Bruce Chatwin. I was taken with his ideas about the nomadic imperative, that migrations were Man’s original state, that journeys were the answer to our unease. People with wandering in their genes, Chatwin wrote, understand “that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”. It was a pretty notion, this romance of nomads, this idea of a freewheeling independence, of a life untethered. I conceived a desire to cross Mongolia by horse; here in a land where horses were still more common than vehicles.

It was some years before I got back to Mongolia. I travelled widely in Asia in that time. And curiously, the vacant lot that had stolen my heart loomed large in the history of almost every country I passed through. Few nations had escaped the attentions of the nomadic “barbarians” who inhabited the grassy heart of Asia. China built a wall to try to keep the nomads at bay. Russia still tries to explain itself by pointing to the long centuries under the Tartar yoke. India’s greatest dynasty, the Mughals, traced their roots to nomadic invaders, their very name a corruption of Mongol.

At the start of the 13th century, the unification of several nomadic tribes under Genghis Khan led to the creation of the Mongol Empire, which rapidly expanded until it stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. When it fell, a kind of curious historical silence seemed to descend over Mongolia. The Mongol hordes went home, and we never heard from them again. Mongolia may once have ruled the world, but most of the world would now find it difficult to point to the country on a map with any degree of accuracy.

I felt a sense of proprietorial elation when I finally got back to Mongolia, the country I had only ever seen from a train. I had decided to ride from Olgii in the west to Dadal in the east, over a thousand miles as the crow flies and god know how many miles as I meandered through mountains and valleys. It would take over five months. It may have been an act of carefree innocence, or perhaps just an act of madness. But it proved the very best of journeys, and though two decades have passed since, a week hardly goes by that I do not think of it.

I travelled like the envoys of Genghis Khan, in relays, changing horses and local guides every few days, to ferry me on the next stage of the ride. A baggage horse carried the gear — tents, cooking equipment, food — though most evenings I found myself the guest of nomads in their gers. The present-day Mongol hordes proved to be shy, gentle, hospitable and, occasionally, very drunk shepherds. Either the world’s most feared conquerors have mellowed or history has treated them unfairly. From one end of Mongolia to the other I was welcomed, warmed, and fed by complete strangers who saw nothing remarkable in their own generosity. Some made inquiries about what I was doing and where I was going, and then, realising my motives were beyond comprehension, moved on politely to other subjects.

The glimpses from the train window had not betrayed me. Mongolian landscapes were stunning. Smoothed to elemental simplicities, they seemed to have been sculpted by winds. Undulating hills, soft as felt, rolled away into grassy infinities, traversed by horses and cloud shadows. Mongolia made the sky, with its baroque clouds, seem crowded and fussy. When I arrived at day’s end in a wide valley of encamped gers, it might have been a tableau of the American plains before the arrival of Europeans: white tents, tethered horses, grazing flocks, pillars of camp smoke. The only sounds were those of nomadic domesticity — children’s voices, dogs barking, the bleating of sheep, neighbours calling to one another across the pastures.

There were towns, scattered across the steppes, usually several days ride apart. They were as dismal as they were unexpected. Built by the communist governments that ruled Mongolia until 1990, they tried to offer the promise of urban life to sceptical herdsmen. Unfamiliar with towns, officials seemed to be working to a checklist — a barren central square, where weeds proliferated, a battered looking school, a health clinic, a shuttered sports arena. Mix in potholes, one or two Russian style tenements, remarkable for the broken windows, and the carcasses of several abandoned jeeps, and you have an air of desolation that bordered on apocalyptic. In summer the towns were empty. In winter, the nomads camped close to them to allow their children to attend the school and their wives to have the benefit of the clinic for childbirth.

In Batshireet, a remote town in the east, there was even a library. A plain room of pine planks, it was full of autumn sunlight and Russian classics — Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov. There was an iron stove, a high counter for reading three-month-old newspapers, and always a couple of boys peering in through the windows with cupped hands. English literature was not well represented. The librarian proudly fetched the single example from a top shelf — Stress Factors in Reinforced Concrete Structures.

I became friends with the librarian. He spent his afternoons outside on a bench in the faltering sunshine, reading Turgenev as autumn leaves gathered about his feet. A willowy young man with a soft voice and a delicate manner, it was impossible to fit him into the ruddy life of the steppes, to picture him squatting in a ger over the sheep bones, or to imagine him on a horse. The librarian’s post had offered him some sanctuary from the nomadic world around him. Among the birch trees, he seemed an ethereal figure.

The librarian was bemused by my journey. He did not understand why I should want to visit Mongolia. What was there to see, he said, except landscape.

“Landscape is a great pleasure,” I said. “Particularly in Mongolia.”

“You do not have to travel a thousand miles to understand that the sky is blue everywhere.” He was quoting Goethe. It occurred to me, in that remote place, that I would need to travel a thousand miles to find anyone else who had heard of Goethe.

“I wanted to see nomadic life,” I said simply.

“What is interesting about nomads?” he asked. His questions were polite but pointed.

“Nomads do not feel the need to settle and to put down roots,” I said. “Their only commitment is to movement. The security that settled people find in building — a wall, a field, a storage barn — nomads seek in migration.”

“But their movement is only physical,” the librarian said. He had folded his book into his lap, the long fingers entwined in the pages, marking his place. He looked across towards the river where the trees were showering delicate squalls of leaves onto the grey water. “Nothing changes here. In Mongolia the only real movement is escape.”

I had been long enough in Mongolia to understand that he was right. It is the irony of nomads, people whose lives were wedded to movement, that their world is so static. It is a society without diversity and without ferment, as if a life of migration had exhausted their quota of restlessness. When I talked of those first horsemen, seen from the train, as riding away into their medieval world, it was not a literary fancy. The world described by William of Rubruck, who visited Mongolia in the 13th century, could be the Mongolian steppes today, right down to the traditional layout of the gers. Since my trip Ulan Bator, the capital, has become a modern bustling city, and many former nomads have been drawn there to settle. But out there across thousands of miles of grassy steppes, almost nothing has changed in the past 20 years because almost nothing has changed in seven centuries.

In Asia, the old divide between nomads and sedentary people, between Cain and Abel, is marked by China’s Great Wall. Traditionally the Chinese have dreaded the Mongols. In turn, the Mongols have pitied the Chinese. They are everything the Mongols are not. The Chinese are communal, self-conscious, reserved, deferential. They fear chaos and long for order. Their attachment to settlement is almost religious, wedded as they are to walled cities of methodical symmetries and rice paddies carefully forged over generations. But while the nomadic steppes have created almost nothing, these ordered Chinese cities have bubbled with invention and creativity and change.

But of course I don’t long for China, the way I long for Mongolia. I miss Mongolia as one misses any great love. Robert Frost said that love is like a poem. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. I hope there is some wisdom, but it is the delight that lingers. I miss the landscape unfolding long languorous limbs. I miss the aroma, some mixture of dung fires and mutton fat. I miss the unpredictable moods of each day, the random encounters, figures on horseback. And most of all, I miss the Mongols themselves. They did not own or fence an inch of land but they crossed the open steppes as if it were their private estate. When the pasturage grew low, they struck camp and disappeared into the hills, carrying their world with them, leaving behind only the worn circles of flattened grass where their gers had stood. In a month or so, even those would be gone. I admire that, their insouciant indifference, the way they feel no need to mark their place or their passage.

BY:Stanley Stewart

The Government of Mongolia’s efforts to disrupt the outbreak of COVID-19 in Ulaanbaatar involve an aggressive regimen of contact tracing, medical surveillance, and compulsory testing and quarantine. Over the past week, numerous buildings and businesses have come under police control and all occupants have been ordered to quarantine in place. These localized lockdowns occur with little warning and, in the event that COVID-19-positive cases are identified, may last for a number of days.

As of February 2, 20 locations in Ulaanbaatar city including Songinokhairkhan (2 areas), Sukhbaatar (4 areas), Chingeltei (4 areas), and Bayazurkh (10 areas) have seen restrictions due to possible COVID-19 exposure. Building occupants and residents of these locations have been subjected to COVID-19 testing, with completely negative results leading to the lifting of localized quarantine restrictions and positive results leading to an extended quarantine period. The National Center for Communicable Diseases reports that even when test results are negative, residents are expected to be re-tested within 14 days and may be contacted by health workers and questioned about symptoms, recent movements, etc.

American citizens in Ulaanbaatar are encouraged to maintain adequate emergency provisions (food, water, medications, etc.) in the event they are required to quarantine in place. Please visit the Department of State’s website for additional recommendations on personal emergency preparedness, which are worth reviewing any time you travel overseas.

Feb. 3 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia will intensify the digitalization of public services to eliminate bureaucracy and improve the accessibility of public services, Prime Minister Luvsannamsrai Oyun-Erdene said Wednesday.

Oyun-Erdene ordered relevant officials to pay special attention to the issue at a regular government meeting.

"We need to further intensify the digitalization of public services in order to eliminate the bureaucracy in the public service or difficulties faced by citizens in accessing public services," he said.

Currently, E-Mongolia electronic platform, a one-stop shop for various government services launched in 2020, allows citizens and legal entities to obtain over 180 types of government services through mobile application. The government aims to increase this number to 592 within this year.

In the future, Mongolia planned to establish a Ministry of E-development to reduce the number of staff for public services, improve e-education of citizens, develop digital economy, and increase information technology-based products and services, said a government statement. Enditem

Feb. 3 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia recorded 27 more COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, bringing its national tally to 1,859, the country's National Center for Communicable Diseases (NCCD) said Wednesday.

"A total of 15,897 tests for COVID-19 were conducted across Mongolia yesterday and 27 of them were positive," Amarjargal Ambaselmaa, head of the NCCD's surveillance department, said at a daily press conference.

The latest cases were locally transmitted and detected in the country's capital Ulan Bator, Ambaselmaa said, adding that the number of COVID-19 infections in the capital city has risen to 1,024.

Meanwhile, 21 more patients recovered from the disease, bringing the total recoveries to 1,392, she said.

The Asian country has so far recorded four COVID-19-related deaths. Enditem

New Delhi: Secretary P&NG held a virtual meeting with H.E. Mr. Batnairamdal Otgonshar, Vice Minister of Mining and Heavy Industry of Mongolia to review the Mongol Oil Refinery project.

This meeting was to follow up on the meeting of Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Hon’ble Minister of PNG with H.E Mr. L. Oyun-Erdene, the then MP, Minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary of Mongolia, currently the PM of Mongolia, in January this year.

Secretary PNG conveyed deep appreciation on the new Law of Mongolia to support the Mongol refinery plant to expedite implementation of the Refinery Project. Secretary PNG reiterated India’s commitment to timely completion of the Mongol Refinery Project, the country’s first oil refinery to be built under a Line of Credit from GoI.

Mongolian Vice Minister conveyed the appreciation of the Mongol Government for GOI's support for the Oil refinery Project, being implemented under Project Monitoring of Engineers India Ltd (EIL), a PSU under MoPNG. He also briefed about the preparations for laying pipelines from crude sources to the refinery site. Both sides agreed to continually monitor the Project for its timely implementation.

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. In January 2021, the Bank of Mongolia (BoM) purchased 1.35 tons of precious metals, showing an increase of 750 kg compared to the same period of the previous year.

In January, BoM branches in Darkhan-Uul and Bayankhongor aimags bought 15.7 kg and 60.3 kg precious metals, respectively.

The average value of BoM’s purchase of 1 gram of gold was MNT 170,985.19 in January 2021.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Scientists gave Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine the green light on Tuesday saying it was almost 92% effective in fighting COVID-19 based on peer-reviewed late-stage trial results published in The Lancet international medical journal.

Experts said the Phase III trial results meant the world had another effective weapon to fight the deadly pandemic and justified to some extent Moscow’s decision to roll out the vaccine before final data had been released.

The results, collated by the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow that developed and tested the vaccine, were in line with efficacy data reported at earlier stages of the trial, which has been running in Moscow since September.

“The development of the Sputnik V vaccine has been criticised for unseemly haste, corner cutting, and an absence of transparency,” said Ian Jones, professor at the University of Reading, and Polly Roy, professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“But the outcome reported here is clear and the scientific principle of vaccination is demonstrated,” the scientists, who were not involved in the study, said in a comment shared by The Lancet. “Another vaccine can now join the fight to reduce the incidence of COVID-19.”

The results were based on data from 19,866 volunteers, of whom a quarter received a placebo, the researchers, led by the Gamaleya Institute’s Denis Logunov, said in The Lancet.

Since the trial began in Moscow, there were 16 recorded cases of symptomatic COVID-19 among people who received the vaccine, and 62 among the placebo group, the scientists said.

This showed that a two-dose regimen of the vaccine - two shots based on two different viral vectors, administered 21 days apart - was 91.6% effective against symptomatic COVID-19.

‘RUSSIA WAS RIGHT’

The Sputnik V vaccine is the fourth worldwide to have Phase III results published in leading peer-reviewed medical journals following the shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.

Pfizer’s shot had the highest efficacy rate at 95%, closely followed by Moderna’s vaccine and Sputnik V while AstraZeneca’s vaccine had an average efficacy of 70%.

Sputnik V has also now been approved for storage in normal fridges, as opposed to freezers, making transportation and distribution easier, Gamaleya scientists said on Tuesday.

Russia approved the vaccine in August, before the large-scale trial had begun, saying it was the first country to do so for a COVID-19 shot. It named it Sputnik V, in homage to the world’s first satellite, launched by the Soviet Union.

Small numbers of frontline health workers began receiving it soon after and a large-scale roll out started in December, though access was limited to those in specific professions, such as teachers, medical workers and journalists.

In January, the vaccine was offered to all Russians.

“Russia was right all along,” Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which is responsible for marketing the vaccine abroad, told reporters on Tuesday.

He said the results supported Russia’s decision to begin administering Sputnik V to frontline workers while the trial was still underway, and suggested scepticism of such moves was politically motivated.

“The Lancet did very unbiased work despite some of the political pressures that may have been out there,” he said.

EFFECTIVE IN ELDERLY

The number of people vaccinated in Russia has remained low so far. Authorities have pointed to some early issues with scaling up production while polls have shown low demand among Russians for the vaccine.

Russia has already shared data from its Phase III trial with regulators in several countries and has begun the process of submitting it to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for approval in the European Union, Dmitriev said.

The data release comes as Europe scrambles to secure enough shots for its 450 million citizens due to production cuts by AstraZeneca and Pfizer. The U.S. roll-out, meanwhile, has been hampered by the need to store shots in ultra-cold freezers and uneven planning across states.

There were 2,144 volunteers over 60 in the Sputnik V trial and the shot was shown to be 91.8% effective when tested on this older group, with no serious side-effects reported that could be associated with the vaccine, The Lancet summary said.

RDIF’s Dimitriev also said the Gamaleya Institute was testing the vaccine against new variants of COVID-19 and the early signs were positive.

The vaccine was also found to be 100% effective against moderate or severe COVID-19, as there were no such cases among the group of 78 participants who were infected and symptomatic at 21 days after the first shot was administered.

Four deaths of participants occurred, but none was considered associated with vaccination, The Lancet said.

“The efficacy looks good, including in the over 60s,” said Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London. “It’s good to have another addition to the global arsenal.”

ONE DOSE VERSION

The authors of the study noted that because COVID-19 cases were only detected when trial participants reported symptoms, further research was needed to understand Sputnik V’s efficacy on asymptomatic cases and transmission.

Sputnik V has been approved by 15 countries, including Argentina, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates and this will rise to 25 by the end of next week, the RDIF’s Dmitriev said.

The sovereign wealth fund also said vaccinations using Sputnik V will begin in a dozen countries including Bolivia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Iran.

Hungary was the first member of the European Union to break ranks and unilaterally approve the vaccine last month. It is set to receive a first batch of 40,000 doses on Tuesday.

Germany has said it would use Sputnik V if it is approved by Europe’s drug regulator while France has said it could buy any efficient vaccine.

However, large shipments of the shot have only been sent so far to Argentina, which has received enough doses to vaccinate about 500,000 people. Production for export will primarily be done by RDIF’s manufacturing partners abroad, the fund has said.

On Tuesday, Dmitriev said production had started in India and South Korea, and would launch in China this month. Trial doses have also been produced by a manufacturer in Brazil.

Russia is conducting a small-scale clinical trial of a one-dose version of the vaccine, which developers expect to have an efficacy rate of 73% to 85%.

Additional reporting by Kate Kelland in London; Writing by Polina Ivanova; Editing by Mark Potter and David Clarke

Drugs giant Pfizer has said it expects $15bn (£11bn) of sales this year of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with German firm BioNTech.

The vaccine was one of the first to be authorised for use by countries including the UK and the US.

The vaccine sales represent a quarter of its expected revenue for this year.

Many countries around the world have been scrambling to vaccinate their populations in a bid to save lives and aid economic recovery.

Pfizer is trying to deliver two billion doses of the vaccine in 2021 as quickly as possible as countries rush to sign supply deals.

In the fourth quarter of last year, the vaccine brought in sales of $154m for Pfizer.

Out of the firms rushing to bring vaccines to market, analysts expect at least Pfizer and rival American biotech company Moderna to make billions of dollars this year.

There have been concerns that global wrangling over supplies could disrupt delivery schedules.

Over the weekend, the European Union backtracked on a decision to trigger an emergency provision in the Brexit deal that could have prevented shipments entering the UK.

The plans had been part of the EU's new export controls on vaccines to try combat delivery shortfalls.

On Tuesday, Japan said it would get all of the vaccine doses it had bought from Pfizer and BioNTech after concerns that the EU export controls could have delayed Japan's inoculation programme.

Japan is trailing most major economies in starting vaccinations, because of its reliance on overseas drugs firms and an insistence that vaccines go through domestic trials.

The country plans to start its campaign in mid-February with the Pfizer/BioNTech jab.

Pfizer and BioNTech have increased manufacturing capacity to more than two billion doses a year from 1.3 billion to meet demand, BioNTech chief executive Ugur Sahin said on Tuesday.

"Therefore we are confident that we will deliver the doses that we have promised to Japan," he said.

Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- The total number of COVID-19 cases in Mongolia has increased to 1,832, the country's National Center for Communicable Diseases (NCCD) said Tuesday.

A total of 18 more locally transmitted cases were reported in the past 24 hours after 9,415 tests had been conducted across the country, the NCCD said in a statement.

The latest confirmed cases were detected in the country's capital Ulan Bator, the center said.

Meanwhile, 13 more patients have recovered from the disease, bringing the total number of recoveries in the country to 1,371, it added.

The Asian country has so far recorded four COVID-19-related deaths since confirming its first case of COVID-19 in March. Enditem