The Australian company Riversdale Mining has announced plans to open its first coal mine in the western Mozambican province of Tete by the end of 2010.

Briefing Mozambican journalists on the company’s operations, Riversdale’s Country Manager for Mozambique, Syd Parkhouse, said that Riversdale has now obtained licences in Tete covering 290,080 hectares.

At one of these tenements, at Benga, in the Moatize coal basin, there is an inferred reserve of 1.9 billion tonnes of coking coal. Benga only covers around 4,000 hectares. The rest of the area licensed to Riversdale is largely unexplored.

The company has tenements on both banks of the Zambezi, and the area concerned extends to the south bank of Lake Cahora Bassa. With over 280,000 hectares still to explore, it is quite likely that there is more coal in the Riversdale tenements than in the better known area in Moatize licensed to the Brazilian Companhia Vale de Rio Doce (CVRD). The Brazilian concession contains an estimated 2.4 billion tonnes of coal.

Riversdale describes Tete as “the next major coking coal basin”. Coking coal is used in steel production, and the main markets are India and China. Riversdale has entered a joint venture with TATA Steel of India, which is the world’s sixth largest steel producer, under which the Indian company has taken a 35 per cent stake in licences covering 24,960 hectares for about 95 million US dollars.