As the minister presented them, the numbers are: the electrolysis plant’s annual aluminium capacity to be doubled from 50,000 to 100,000 tonnes; exports of copper, gold and silver up from 600 million manats in 2025 to 1.6 billion in 2030; aluminium exports from 252 million to 510 million; more than 5,000 permanent jobs; an expected positive financial effect of more than a billion manats a year once the programme runs.
The deposits behind the targets are old names. Filizchay in Balakan district, a polymetallic ore body described at the meeting as one of the most promising on the European continent and one of the most complex; Dashkasan’s iron ore, where the plan is 2 million tonnes of hot-briquetted iron a year and “a full chain of the mining industry, up to the final product”; geological exploration in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic “will probably begin next year”, the president said. He also put a figure on the liberated districts: 60,000 hectares of forest fund destroyed, looted, felled and sold by the Armenian state, in his words, in Kalbajar, Lachin and Zangilan during the occupation, with forests burned after the Second Karabakh War.
Before a tonne is dug, the programme’s first task is measurement. The president said the figures that circulate for the deposits were set in Soviet times and that about 40 years have passed since; the reserves of the existing deposits have to be fully clarified. A programme that sells 3.4 billion manats of metal in 2030 on the strength of numbers from the 1980s is a programme whose investment case is written before its geology.
The state pays most of it. Of the 5.3 billion manats, 3.3 billion come from the budget and state companies, 62%, and 2 billion from private funds. The state company in the middle of it is AzerGold, created by presidential order in 2015, mining gold at Chovdar in Dashkasan since 2016 and stating at the meeting that its goal for the coming period is an annual turnover of 1 billion manats. The budget line, 1.1 billion over 4 years, sits inside a 2027 draft budget reported on 16 September with revenue of 39.234 billion manats and spending of 42.4 billion, and the oil that funds it moved on the same day as the meeting: Azeri Light printed at $116.83 on Tuesday morning, down $5.54 from Friday.
Before a tonne is dug, the programme’s first task is measurement.
What the programme does not yet carry is a document number or an adoption date. The meeting considered the draft; the minister’s figures are the plan’s targets; the president’s instruction on the reserves comes first in time, since the exploration in Nakhchivan starts next year and the programme starts in 2027. The measure of the 5.3 billion will be the first audited reserve figure the state publishes for Filizchay or Dashkasan, and the year it publishes it.