Yara suspends Sokli mining project
Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara halts development of its Sokli phosphorus mining project in Finnish Lapland on the border to Russia.
The reason for the suspension is that the anticipated profitablility of the project is below Yara’s requirement, the company writes in a press release.
Before concluding, Yara will seek to finalize the process of obtaining environmental and mining permits and clarify other prerequisites for project execution. Yara may also re-evalute the project in the future.
Yara has invested €18.5 million in the Sokli project.
In 2011 Yara launched a plan to build a 55 kilometer tube- or railway line across the Russian border to Kovdor on the Kola peninsula, where the ore from the Sokli mine was to be processed at an existing concentrator plant. A year later Yara cancelled these plans, arguing that the refinery in Kovdor was not technically suitable for handling ore from Sokli, and that an upgrade would be as expensive as building a brand new plant, BarentsObserver reported.
