China has discovered and reported a number of large-scale confirmed mineral resources, including gold, copper, phosphorus as well as other minerals in the first three quarters of this year, the Ministry of Natural Resources announced on Friday.

Tang Zhengguo, an official of the geological exploration management department of the ministry, said that the uncovered mineral resources are distributed across five provinces and autonomous regions.

These discoveries include 57.8 tons of gold, 3.83 million tons of copper and 137,000 tons of molybdenum in Heilongjiang province; new phosphate resources amounting to 367.5 million tons in Sichuan province; a new phosphate resource quantity of 78.86 million tons in Guizhou province; an increase of 5.89 million tons in fluorite resources in Inner Mongolia autonomous region and a newly added fluorite resource of more than 1 million tons in Zhejiang province.

Regarding solid mineral resources, from January to June this year, 138 prospective mining areas were outlined, 374 mining target areas were identified and 50 new mineral deposits were discovered, according to Tang.

Moreover, in terms of oil and gas mineral resources, two deep coal bed gas reserves of billion-cubic-meter scale have been discovered, Tang said.