Demireller Mining Ltd, a family-owned Turkish company, formed in 2002, following the discovery of large diasporic bauxite deposits near the family’s town in the Taurus Mountains, near Mersin, southern Turkey.
Demireller holds around 10m. tonnes of bauxite from 15 deposits, and last year produced 500,000 tonnes of various bauxite grades, including grades for abrasives, calcium aluminate cement (CAC), Portland cement, and slag conditioning.
Owing to the location of the company’s bauxite deposits, which are at an altitude of 2,000-2,400 metres, Demireller is constrained to mining from early May to late October, and tends to work on four open pit mines simultaneously.
Halil Demirel, general manager of Demireller, told IM: “When we started exploration we were dealing with olivine at the time,...