S.Korea signs $8B in deals with Kazakhstan

South Korea will jointly construct a power-producing plant and a petrochemical-producing complex

Πηγή: Universal Newswires
Thursday, August 25, 2011

South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak continued his Central Asian tour on Thursday, signing $8 billion in deals with Kazakhstan.

One project, worth $4 billion, will see South Korean firm LG Chem jointly build a petrochemical complex in Central Asia’s largest state.

The complex is expected to produce polyethylene and ethylene, manufacturing 880,000 tons and 924,000 tons of the materials respectively, the Reuters news agency reported on Thursday. Construction is expected to be completed in 2016, with commercial production beginning in 2017.

The complex will be located in Atyrau, a city in Western Kazakhstan on the coast of the Caspian Sea.

The other $4 billion project involves building a coal-powered electricity-generating plant in southern Kazakh city Balkhash, the Yonhap news agency reported. The plant will generate 1,320 megawatts of power. South Korean power company Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) and Samsung C&T each hold 35 percent of the shares in the project.
 

The plant will satisfy 7 percent of Kazakhstan’s current energy demands.

The deals are the largest to be signed by the two countries since Kazakhstan’s independence in 1992.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev underlined the importance of the Kazakh-Korean relationship.

“I would like to outline that over the past three years we made a significant breakthrough in our relations, and now they have character of strategic cooperation between our countries,” the Kazinform news agency quoted Nazarbayev as saying.

South Korea has invested over $4 billion in Kazakhstan, he added.