Red Island Minerals Ltd (RIM) is a

Perth Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is ...

Western Australia-based

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when dea ...

development company operating in

Madagascar Madagascar (; mg, Madagasikara, ), officially the Republic of Madagascar ( mg, Repoblikan'i Madagasikara, links=no, ; french: République de Madagascar), is an island country in the Indian Ocean, approximately off the coast of East Africa ...

. The company is wholly owned by PTT Asia Pacific Mining Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of

PTT Public Company Limited PTT Public Company Limited or simply PTT ( th, บริษัท ปตท. จำกัด (มหาชน)) is a Thai state-owned SET-listed oil and gas company. Formerly known as the Petroleum Authority of Thailand, it owns extensive submar ...

, a state-owned

Thai Thai or THAI may refer to: * Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia ** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand ** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand *** Thai script *** Thai (Unicode block ...

company. Red Island Minerals was founded by Sam Malin under the name Petrosearch International on 2 March 2005. Its name was changed to Red Island Minerals in 2008. Red Island Minerals develops the Sakoa coal field in southwestern Madagascar. It operates through its wholly owned subsidiary, Madagascar Consolidated Mining SARL, in which the Malagasy government agency

OMNIS {{other uses, Omnis (disambiguation) OMNIS (Office des Mines Nationales et des Industries Stratégiques, formerly known as Office Militaire National pour les Industries Stratégiques) is the Malagasy government organisation, operating under the aus ...

holds a minority stake.

Sakoa Coal Field

The Sakoa Coal Field is in the southwest of Madagascar and coal was first discovered in the area in 1908. Small-scale mining was undertaken during World War II. Drilling results indicate that the field is large with a seam measuring up to thick in places. The product is a thermal coal similar in specification to coal currently being exported by South Africa and is likely to be used in power plants in India and Western Europe. It was estimated in 2015 that 200 million tonnes of coal are recoverable from the field, with an estimated potential resource tonnage of over one billion tonnes. It is expected that the coal will mostly be mined by the

open pit Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a borrow. This form of mining ...

method, and that extraction will initially be at the rate of five million tonnes per year.

References

External links

Thai group PTT Mining to buy Straits Resources

Straits Resources Ltd acquires Red Island Minerals
Coal companies of Madagascar Coal companies of Australia Companies with year of establishment missing {{coal-company-stub