"I like the place the locals call it OT just like UB for Ulan Bator because it's cold and the people are warm...they are very hospitable."
As we bumped into each other at Seoul airport (I was returning to KL from UB while he was going to UB), Pimentel said he needed the job to support his wife and the couple's two sons, aged 12 and 16, in Manila.
"I design roads in OT (Oyu Tolgoi) but I don't know when the project will end, it's a contract," said the 37-year-old who has been in Mongolia over the past five months.
OT is the world's largest undeveloped copper-gold project and is located in the South Gobi region of Mongolia, approximately 550km south of the capital Ulan Bator (locals call it Ulaanbaatar) and 80km north of the Mongolia-China border.
Pimentel has grown fond of Mongolia which has only 2.9 million people, almost half of them living in the capital built for 500,000.
"Despite the mineral rich status, the Mongolians are environmental-conscious and want to preserve the Gobi desert," he said.
Mongolian Prime Minister S. Batbold said, the mining industry had been intensively developing the country and a massive work on putting such world class deposits as OT copper mine and Tavan Togoi coal deposit into economic turnover have been actively conducted, attracting the interest of many countries.
"Mongolia finds itself among countries with relatively high rates of economic growth," he told the Organisation of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA)Executive Board Meeting (EBM) here last Tuesday.
"If in 2010, our economy enjoyed six per cent growth rate, in the first
quarter of 2011, it increased to 9.7 per cent," he said.
Construction of high-rise buildings could be seen everywhere in the capital.
The OT mine or Turquoise Hill is a combined open pit and underground mining
project in Khanbogd sum within the south Gobi Desert.
It is developed as a joint venture involving the Ivanhoe Mines of Canada,
Australia's Rio Tinto and the Mongolian Government.
The production is scheduled to begin in 2013.
The OT mining project is the largest financial undertaking in Mongolia's history and is expected, upon completion, to account for more than 30 per cent of the country's gross domestic product.
Last year, the number of processing factories in the country increased by 10
per cent.
Noting the intense speed in growth of the trade and services sector, Batbold
said Mongolia was also proud of the robust penetration of information technologies.
"A historic contribution of our nomadic ancestors to the world's culture was
the communication system of 'morin urtuu's' or horse relay station that the Mongolians had organised in 13th-14th centuries to link China, Mongolia, Russia
and Europe," he said.
Mongolian National News Agency (Montsame) General Director T. Baasansuren said the economic future of Mongolia looked bright.
"The government has identified 17 large deposits of oil, copper, fluorite, molybdenum, gold, uranium, etc...
"Bilateral and multilateral talks on joint exploration of these deposits have been going on intensively," he said, expressing confidence that the development of mining would completely change the structure of Mongolia's economy.
"According to estimates of the international investment bank, JP Morgan, Mongolia's GDP will grow not less than by 15 per cent between 2011 and 2015.
"Hence in 2016, Mongolia's GDP per capita will increase from the current USD$2,000 to USD$8,000.
"When the Oyu Tolgoi copper deposit which attracted large international attention is put into exploration in 2013, Mongolia will supply between three
and five per cent of the world's copper," said Baasansuren.
