From Bloomie:
China has begun looking at funding a railway and port that would service Rio Tinto Group’s Simandou iron project in Guinea and cost more than $10 billion, said four people with direct knowledge of the matter. The agency overseeing companies owned by China’s central government has gauged interest from state rail and port builders and also contacted China Development Bank Corp. about providing financing, said the people, who asked not to be identified as they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Guinea’s inability to fund the rail line from its coast to Simandou, described by Rio as the world’s largest untapped deposit of iron ore, has “effectively frozen” the project, former mines minister Mahmoud Thiam said in April.
Simandou is a 95 million tones per annum mine.
