Orascom Construction Industries (OCI) Egypt announced that an OCI/Faruk Rasool Group/Blair Sayed Magid consortium has obtained regulatory approvals for the construction of a new greenfield cement plant in the Bazian area of Kurdistan with a total production capacity of 2.5Mta. Total investment cost is estimated at US$300m. Construction of the plant is scheduled to begin during the second quarter of 2005 with a target completion period of 26 months.
Currently, an OCI/Faruk Rasool Group consortium (51-49 percent) is undertaking the rehabilitation of the Tasluja cement plant near Suleimaneyah City which is the largest cement plant in Kurdistan – Iraq. An OCI/Polysius project team is mobilised on site and production is scheduled to start next month. The Tasluja plant should reach its full design capacity of 2.3Mta by the beginning of 2006.
With the completion of the new Bazian greenfield cement project in late 2007, the OCI Cement Group will have an annual production capacity in northern Iraq of 4.8Mta and will have a total annual production capacity in emerging markets of 20Mt, ranking it quite high among the largest cement producers in the world.
