Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia attracted 27,400 foreign visitors during the first three quarters of 2021, down 54.7 percent from the same period last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Statistics Office said on Tuesday.

China, Russia and South Korea were the biggest sources of foreign travelers to Mongolia during the January-September period this year, it said.

Currently, Mongolia's economy is largely dependent on its export-oriented mining sector. Developing tourism is seen as the most viable way to diversify the economy. However, tourism has been among the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic

Oyu Tolgoi’s underground expansion has been hamstrung by delays, development issues and cost overruns for years. Rio Tinto and Turquoise Hill Resources signed a development and financing plan with Mongolia in 2015 that provided basis for funding the project — but six years on, production has yet to begin in a sustainable way.

Once the underground expansions are completed, Oyu Tolgoi is expected produce more than 500,000 tonnes of copper per year. Initial projections estimated that the mine would be able to sustainably produce copper from 2021 onwards. However, last December, Rio Tinto pushed the timeline back and said “sustainable production” was expected to commence in October 2022. The miner also said the underground expansion would cost $6.75 billion, higher than previous estimates.

On Friday, Rio Tinto again delayed that forecast and said sustainable production will happen “no earlier than January 2023.”

The company cited the impact of Covid-19 and outstanding issues around caving operations. It warned that Mongolia’s additional Covid-19 restrictions this year to tackle community transmission is set to add an estimated $140 million to the budget as of the end of September. While Rio Tinto blamed the delays and rising costs on challenging ground conditions, an independent review this year contradicted that explanation.

The Independent Consulting Group’s report, commissioned by Rio Tinto’s partners on the project, concluded that poor management was the main reason the mine’s underground expansion was running almost two years late and $1.45 billion over budget, the Financial Times reported.

The open-pit and underground mining project is being jointly developed by the government, which owns about 34% of Oyu Tolgoi, and Rio Tinto’s Canadian subsidiary Turquoise Hill Resources that has a 66% stake in it. The Anglo-Australian miner owns nearly 51% stake in Turquoise Hill Resources.

E.Batshugar, a son of former President N.Enkhbayar became a member of Mongolian parliament after winning the by-election in Songinokhairkhan district of Ulaanbaatar. According to the General Election Commission (GEC), the 34 year-old E.Batshugar received 28 thousand votes or 51.2 percent at re-polling.

The re-polling at two electoral districts of the by-election for two parliament seats from Songinokhairkhan district of Ulaanbaatar and Khentii province was held on 16 October. Other candidate Ts.Iderbat won a parliament seat from Khentii province, where he has been worked as a Governor since 2020. The 40 year-old governor has got over 17 thousand votes or 73.3 percent at re-polling.

Two by-elections were held to find replacements for D.Sumiyabazar, who was elected to parliament from Songinokhairkhan district before assuming position as Ulaanbaatar Mayor, and President U.Khurelsukh, was elected as lawmaker from Khentii province before becoming President.

E.Batshugar’s nomination from Mongolian People’s Party came after a reunion between N.Enkhbayar’s Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party and ruling party. After 10 years of separation, ruling Mongolian People’s Party has united with Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party. Established by the communist founder of the modern Mongolian state, D.Sukhbaatar in 1921, the political party divided in 2010 after changing its name from the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party to simply the Mongolian People’s Party. Since then, former prime-minister and president, N.Enkhbayar has led the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party.

It has been announced that State Honored artist E.Amartuvshin won Opera Star award which is also known as Opera Oscars.

He was named the world's best baritone singer and the award will be presented on December 29 in Dubai, UAE. In his previous interview, he said “The opera singer's voice is classified as soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, and the male as countertenor, tenor, baritone, and bass. Three people are nominated from each classification. I am nominated for this award along with two great baritone singers."

Baritone E.Amartuvshin won numerous prizes from national and international opera competitions such as the 2nd prize and a public award for the best male singer from the XIV Tchaikovsky Competition, the Grand-Prix prize from Plаcido Domingo’s Operalia International Competition for Opera singers, the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at the 2015 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.

Ecological economist Lester R. Brown in his book “Plan B 3.0” suggested six grand strategies for overcoming the global climate and ecological crises, one of which is to restore lost forests around the world.

Forests originally covered around 60 to 70 percent of land (13 billion hectares). However, the proportion of forests has been reduced to around 30 percent (3.9 billion hectares) due to the desertification, deforestation, conversion of forest, and expansion of agricultural and pasture land due to population growth. Forests have been facing the risk of being cut down and degraded.

Forests currently absorb around 16 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Therefore, we can additionally absorb more than 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and produce 20 billion tons of oxygen per year by increasing the size of forests by 50 percent. The humid climate created in forested territory leads to increasing land productivity and expanding habitable land, and enables us to preserve the tremendous variety of living species.

However, wouldn’t it be surprising if the Republic of Korea can make this grand plan a reality? Dr. Brown already highlighted the Korea’s history of success in forestation over the past 30 to 40 years as an actual case of implementing the strategy. And our country’s success story has already set an example for countries suffering tropical forest losses, desertification and arid progress.

There are efforts at the international level. The United Nations Environmental Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization have recently established and implemented a 10-year plan from 2021 to 2030 for restoring the global ecosystem. And the UN has set a goal to plant 1 trillion trees, urging all countries to join. The necessity and urgency of restoring the world’s forests to overcome the climate and ecological crises are increasing, And therefore, the role of Korea, which holds the key, is more in demand than ever.

Korea has engaged in the world’s forest restoration from early stages, taking a further step from its own success in reforestation. The Korea Forest Service achieved more than 8,000 hectares of afforestation in the Kubuqi Desert, China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, after painstaking efforts in preventing desertification. The project notably kicked off on the occasion of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Seoul and Beijing in the mid-1990s and was implemented with the funding from Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). The success of Kubuqi Desert afforestation opened the door for a large-scale afforestation project in China, the country most affected by yellow dust. However, China has now become the country achieving the world’s largest-scale afforestation in desert regions.

Mongolia‘s anti-desertification and afforestation project began in the mid-2000s. In 2005, the Korean and Mongolian government planned to establish a 200,000-hectare greenbelt with a total length of about 3,500 km. The first phase of the project was implemented for 10 years from 2007 to 2016. As a result, a total of 3,046 hectares of afforestation was completed in desert and arid regions, including 833 hectares in Lun soum, 673 hectares in Dalanzadgad, and 1,540 hectares in Bayanzag.

The second phase of the project was carried out for five years from 2017 to this year, and as a result, the construction of an urban forest covering around 40 hectares in Sukhbaatar District of the capital Ulaanbaatar was completed. Mongolia is much colder, drier, and windy as its climate conditions are different from China’s. Therefore, it is crucial to create conditions to overcome difficulties in advance. It is necessary to select tree species suitable for the local climate, secure sufficient seedlings and groundwater, and establish windbreak facilities. During my visit to the site for the afforestation project in Mongolia, I could see Poplars and Siberian elms planted in the arid land of Lun soum growing densely. The trees, which are planted in the early stage of the project and grow more than 10 meters, form a forest belt. The survival rate of Saxaul trees planted in the desert area is over 90 percent, which demonstrates the potential for reforesting the Gobi Desert.

During the visit to Mongolia, Korean and Mongolian governments confirmed the tangible achievements as well as reached a deal to implement the third phase of the anti-desertification and afforestation project and agreed to further expand and diversify it. This is a follow-up measure to the summit recently held online between the leaders of the two countries. Seoul also plans to develop this project from a bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) to a multilateral international project.

Desertification already has been underway in 73 percent of Mongolia’s territory, and forest area only accounts for 7 percent of its territory. But the achievements of the anti-desertification and afforestation project in Mongolia are a living hope for the country by showing the potential to achieve reforestation like Korea. Besides, reforestation can fundamentally resolve the problem of yellow dust in Northeast Asia stemming from the Gobi Desert, and furthermore, it is a substantial solution to the problem of humankind who are facing climate and ecological crises.

Wild sandstorms still blow in from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia in our generation, but we look forward to a fragrant forest wind blowing from the desert at least in the next generation.

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Choi Byeong-Am is the minister of Korea Forest Service. – Ed.

By Korea Herald (khnews@heraldcorp.com)

The copper market is so tight that spot contracts traded at the biggest premium over futures in at least 27 years in London.

The spread between cash and three-month futures surged to over $1,000 a ton on the London Metal Exchange on Monday, a premium not seen since at least 1994. The spread has been widening since early October as demand outpaced supply amid dwindling global exchange inventories.

Freely available inventories have shrunk by more than 90% over the past two months in LME-monitored warehouse after a surge in orders. And with stockpiles also declining quickly in China and the U.S., physical traders are firmly bullish on the fundamental outlook for the metal, even as macroeconomic headwinds loom.

The copper market is seen as a bellwether for economic growth because of the metal’s central role in construction, wiring and electronic goods. Dwindling global supplies and a widening price gap between cash prices and contracts for future delivery signal that buyers are accelerating efforts to lock in supplies.

“The LME notes recent price activity in the copper market,” te exchange said in an email to Bloomberg. “We will continue to closely monitor the situation, and have further options available to ensure continued market orderliness if these are required.”

(By Yvonne Yue Li, with assistance from Jack Farchy)

Mongolia is concerned about Rio Tinto’s management of the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in the Gobi desert in the southern part of the country, a government official told CNBC.

“We have concerns about the transparency and we also have concerns whether this mine is being operated efficiently,” Solongoo Bayarsaikhan, deputy chief of the Mongolian government’s cabinet secretariat, said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”

The open-pit and underground mining project is being jointly developed by the government, which owns about 34% of Oyu Tolgoi, and Rio Tinto’s Canadian subsidiary Turquoise Hill Resources that has a 66% stake in it.

The Anglo-Australian miner owns nearly 51% stake in Turquoise Hill Resources.

What happened?

Oyu Tolgoi’s underground expansion has been hamstrung by delays, development issues and cost overruns for years.

Rio Tinto and Turquoise Hill Resources signed a development and financing plan with Mongolia in 2015 that provided basis for funding the project — but six years on, production has yet to begin in a sustainable way.

Once the underground expansions are completed, Oyu Tolgoi is expected produce more than 500,000 tonnes of copper per year.

Initial projections estimated that the mine would be able to sustainably produce copper from 2021 onwards.

However, last December, Rio Tinto pushed the timeline back and said “sustainable production” was expected to commence in October 2022. The miner also said the underground expansion would cost $6.75 billion, higher than previous estimates.

On Friday, Rio Tinto again delayed that forecast and said sustainable production will happen “no earlier than January 2023.”

The company cited the impact of Covid-19 and outstanding issues around caving operations. It warned that Mongolia’s additional Covid restrictions this year to tackle community transmission is set to add an estimated $140 million to the budget as of the end of September.

While Rio Tinto blamed the delays and rising costs on challenging ground conditions, an independent review this year contradicted that explanation.

The Independent Consulting Group’s report, commissioned by Rio Tinto’s partners on the project, concluded that poor management was the main reason the mine’s underground expansion was running almost two years late and $1.45 billion over budget, the Financial Times reported.

Mongolia reacts

Rio Tinto reportedly challenged the findings of the report in a letter to Mongolia’s justice minister and said the review did not fully recognize the full impact of weaker-than-expected conditions that forced the mine to be redesigned.

“We asked Rio Tinto to explain the discrepancies between the independent review report and Rio Tinto’s position,” Bayarsaikhan told CNBC on Friday.

“We didn’t find the letter satisfactory, in terms of responding to our specific queries and specific concerns over why there is a cost overrun and scheduled delays, why there’s very different conclusions in the independent review report,” she said. “Rio Tinto didn’t provide sufficient responses.”

Bayarsaikhan explained that the Mongolian government wants to find a “mutually beneficial solution” and avoid further surprises in terms of further cost increase and delays.

Russia’s Energy Ministry signed an agreement this week with India’s Steel Industry Ministry aimed at increasing Russian coking coal supply to India to 40 million tons per year.

The deal was inked at the Russian Energy Week Forum, held from October 13-15 in Moscow.

According to Russian Energy Minister Nikolay Shulginov, Russia currently supplies around eight million tons of all types of coal to the South Asian country.

The agreement is also meant to stimulate enterprises in Russia and India in the development of coal deposits, the development of coal logistics and infrastructure, the promotion of R&D in production, as well as education and training for the coal industry.

The world’s third-largest coal importer, India, is currently struggling with coal shortages. Coal accounts for around 70% of the nation’s electricity generation. Most of India’s coal-fired power plants have critically low levels of inventory amid growing electricity demand.

A widening gap between soaring international and domestic coal prices has also seen imports decline sharply in recent months.

Next year, Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas will put up a gargantuan prototype - a 15-megawatt (MW) wind turbine that will be powerful enough to provide electricity to roughly 13,000 British homes.

It will be the biggest such turbine in the world, though potentially not for long. Wind turbines just keep getting bigger - and it's happening faster than almost anybody predicted.

Chinese firm, MingYang, recently announced plans for an even more powerful device clocking in at 16MW, for example. Just four years ago, the maximum capacity of an offshore turbine was 8MW.

"It's happening quicker than we would wish, in a sense," says Aurélie Nasse, head of offshore product market strategy at Vestas. The firm is one of a handful that have led the development of super-sized turbines - but headaches associated with building ever larger machines are beginning to emerge.

"We need to make sure it's a sustainable race for everyone in the industry," says Ms Nasse, as she points out the need for larger harbours, and the necessary equipment and installation vessels required to bring today's huge turbine components offshore.

Then there's the hefty investments required to get to that point. "If you look at the financial results of the [manufacturers], basically none of us make money anymore," explains Ms Nasse. "That's a big risk."

Yet the wind industry's willingness to push limits is one of its greatest strengths, she adds. A double-edged sword, or turbine blade, if you will. And there are few signs that the race to 20MW turbines and beyond is about to slow down.

"It's just astonishing," says Guy Dorrell, a spokesman for Siemens Gamesa, referring to the fact that a single offshore wind farm can now power a million homes. By the end of this year, his firm plans to install an onshore prototype of a 14MW offshore turbine that can be boosted to supply 15MW.

"We've worked out that a single turn of a 14MW turbine would power a Tesla Model 3 for 352km (218 miles)," he says. Besides heightened power output, one of the advantages of bigger turbines is that they are more efficient in terms of installation time and cost - clearly, you only need one base structure and set of cables for a 14MW turbine versus two for a pair of 7MW machines.

The UK currently has about 10.5 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity and this is set to quadruple by 2030. But that still isn't enough to deliver net-zero electricity by 2035, according to researchers at Imperial College, London.

Whatever happens next the demand is there and you can bet that bigger turbines will become more commonplace, says Christoph Zipf, a spokesman for Wind Europe, an industry body.

Twenty years from now, 15MW turbines will be viewed as "average", he predicts.

It may happen even sooner than that. The UK's newest offshore wind projects, planned for Dogger Bank in the middle of the North Sea, are already set to use 13 and 14MW turbines.

But surely there are limits to how large these structures can get? They are already mind-boggling. Each blade on Vestas' 15MW turbine is 115.5m (379ft) long - nearly as long as London's Centre Point tower is high. The turbine itself has a rotor diameter of 236m (London's tallest building, The Shard, is 310m tall).

"There has to be a physical limit although nobody has yet put a number on that," says Simon Hogg, at Durham University. Prof Hogg holds the Ørsted chair at the university, which is funded by energy firm Ørsted.

Instead, it's the practicalities of putting these machines in place and maintaining them that might first become problematic.

Prof Deborah Greaves at Plymouth University says of super-sized offshore turbines, "There are still open questions around the cumulative environmental impact and the capacity of the marine environment."

Wind turbines do have some negative effects on wildlife but the extent of this, at scale, is difficult to measure. Plus, very large wind farms at sea must be sited carefully to avoid conflict with shipping lanes.

Prof Hogg adds that the cost of maintaining hundreds of very large turbines, miles offshore could go up over time. "Something like that, may be the defining driver as to how big offshore wind turbines can actually get," he says.

Then there are the technical niggles. The really big turbines tend to be positioned far away from land but that means the electricity they generate must travel huge distances.

When transmitted using alternating current (AC), some power ends up getting lost. Converting to direct current (DC) is much more efficient but using DC at very large scales requires significant advances in engineering, says Prof Hogg.

Plus, the tip of a very long turbine blade travels faster than the tip on shorter blades rotating at the same rate - given it has a longer distance to cover in the same amount of time.

However, current turbine designs have a maximum speed for the blade tip of around 90m/s, or 324km/h (201mph), says Prof Hogg, which has a "big effect on the overall aerodynamics of the blade."

He adds that blades are also twisted slightly near the tip to ensure good performance, although there is a limit on how much they can be twisted. That means there is a limit on a blade's size and speed of rotation.

In short, while building a wind turbine significantly bigger than today's giants may be possible from a manufacturing standpoint, it could be the practicalities and costs of installing, maintaining and operating them that really challenge their seemingly unstoppable growth in the future.

As Ms Nasse says, "We need to be a little careful of the pace."