Thirteen hundred metres beneath the vast Gobi Desert, the heat, dust and a sense of claustrophobia are unshakeable after a rapid trip down a mine shaft in a freight elevator known as “the cage”.
Yet Ganbat Tuvshinbat, a local mining engineer, grins broadly. “This is the warmest place in Mongolia,” he says of a country where the average temperature is below zero. “Here you can experience summer all year round.”
Tuvshinbat and his employer Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian multinational, have reason to smile. Towards the end of this decade, the company plans to produce about half a million tonnes of copper from the Oyu Tolgoi mine each year, enough of the metal to help build 6mn electric vehicles. When the underground mine is fully operational, it will be the fourth biggest copper project in the world — a boon for the Mongolian government, which holds a 34 per cent stake.