Vol. 11 No. 2 (2008): INDONESIAN MINING JOURNAL Vol. 11 No. 2 June 2008

Spectacularly infrastructural development in the world, particularly in China and India, makes prices of mineral and coal commodities sharply increase, and this causes high demand of those commodities. It is predicted that it will happen a trend of struggling those resources in the future. However, this case can positively be supposed as the emerging of huge market opportunity. The conflict, even war, takes place in the 20th century and probably will continue in the 21st century in Africa, South America and Asia. This conflict is mostly triggered by the fighting of the mineral and coal resources that are limited in the reserves. For these reasons, Indonesia should play the role of utilising its mineral and coal resources, particularly for the prosperity of the people.

The progress on coal and mineral technology in Indonesia indicates promising results that have been carried out by a lot of researchers from R&D institutions in collaboration with user industries. When the results are developed, it is expected that those commodities can respond and fulfil the needs either domestically or internationally. Indonesia has great iron mineral resources in the forms of primary iron ore, iron sand and lateritic iron ore. There is an opportunity to process it by apply- ing an appropriate technology to obtain the improvement of the result. This is a promising solution to beneficiate the resources for a lot of industries in the country. An effort to reduce iron content in kaolin can be made by applying beneficiation test. The kaolin may become whiter and can reach the standard quality for paper industry. The result of the experiment shows that the optimum con- dition with a certain flow rate gives the quality of kaolin concentrate with a little iron content. An appraisal of the marine magnetic anomalies over the Belitung waters provides information on the distribution of magnetic susceptibility values. The susceptibility distribution analyses reveal a strong correlation between magnetic susceptibility and type of granites. The nature of submerged Belitung intrusive is suggested as granitic pluton that is associated with cassiterite minerals. This strongly indicates that exploration of tin minerals can be carried out in offshore of Belitung island in order to add its reserve. Indonesian coal has a potential to be a major future energy source due to its huge resource, low cost of exploitation, good quality and supported by appropriate infrastructure. Unfortunately, more than 65% of the resources are categorised as low rank coal. This type needs to be upgraded prior to utilising and transporting for a long distance. One of the upgrading pro- cesses is UBC (upgraded brown coal). Therefore, the coal can be used optimally. Geological set- ting of the West Java region has a main role to characterise the coal deposits, especially due to the depositional environment and stratigraphic aspect. According to the petrographic characteristics, the coals are suitable for fuel of direct combustion for the small-scale industries that are present in the surrounding areas. The coals are expected to be able economically to cope with the demand of those industries.

The progress and development of the improving technology conducted by the researchers is ex- pected to improve the collaboration between R&D and industries, particularly in self fulfilling the commodities in which some of them are imported from overseas, especially from China. Thus, this can reduce dependence of the commodities.

The Editor