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Romania Other Minerals
Romania possesses commercial deposits of a wide range
of
metallic ores, including iron, manganese, chrome, nickel,
molybdenum, aluminum, zinc, copper, tin, titanium,
vanadium, lead,
gold, and silver. The development of these reserves was a
key
element of the country's industrialization after World War
II. To
exploit the ores, the government built numerous mining and
enrichment centers, whose output in turn was delivered to
the
country's large and ever-expanding metallurgical and
machinebuilding industries.
The major known iron ore deposits are found in the
PoianaRusca Mountains (a spur of the Transylvanian Alps) and the
Banat,
Dobruja, and the Harghita Mountains (in the Eastern
Carpathians).
Though commercially significant, these deposits were
unable to
satisfy the huge new steel mills that were the centerpiece
of
Romania's industrial modernization after the mid-1960s.
Indeed, by
1980 Romania had to import more than 80 percent of its
iron ore.
Some experts predicted that domestic iron ore resources
would be
exhausted by the early 1990s.
Most of the nonferrous metal reserves are concentrated
in the
northwest, particularly in the Maramures Mountains (in the
Eastern
Carpathians) and the Apuseni Mountains (in the Western
Carpathians). The Maramures range contains important
deposits of
polymetallic sulfides--from which copper, lead, and zinc
are
obtained--and certain precious metals. The Apuseni range
holds
silver and some of the richest gold deposits in Europe.
Major
copper, lead, and zinc deposits also have been discovered
in the
Bistrita Mountains, the Banat, and Dobruja. Bauxite is
mined in
the Oradea area in northwestern Transylvania. Although new
mines to
extract these ores continued to be developed throughout
the 1970s
and 1980s, the proclaimed goal of self-sufficiency in
nonferrous
metals by 1985 was unrealistic, considering that in 1980
foreign
sources supplied 73 percent of the zinc, 40 percent of the
copper,
and 23 percent of the lead consumed by Romanian industry.
The country also has commercial reserves of other
minerals,
which are processed by a large chemical industry that
barely
existed before World War II. The inorganic chemical
industry
exploits sulfur obtained as a metallurgical by-product or
refined
from gypsum, an abundant mineral. There are large deposits
of pure
salt at Slanic, Tîrgu Ocna, and Ocna Mures. Caustic soda,
soda
ash, chlorine, sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, and
phosphate
fertilizers are among the chemical products based on
domestic raw
materials.
Data as of July 1989
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