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Freeport open mine may resume work this week
PT Freeport Indonesia likely to resume production activities at its Grasberg open mine site in Papua this week as investigators consider the facility âsafe enoughâ, a senior minister has said
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T Freeport Indonesia likely to resume production activities at its Grasberg open mine site in Papua this week as investigators consider the facility 'safe enough', a senior minister has said.
While the condition of the hillside of the mining firm's working area needs 'close attention', its open pit was quite safe for operations, Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Jero Wacik said on Tuesday.
The Grasberg site generally produces 140,000 tons of ore per day or around 64 percent of Freeport's daily production in Papua.
'Our investigation team said [Freeport's] open-mine facility is relatively safe and, thus, its operations might be restarted in order to ensure that workers continue their activities and we [the government] can start getting revenue from taxes,' he said. 'If the production remains completely stopped then all of us will be waiting in vain.'
The government, however, was currently waiting for PT Freeport Indonesia, a subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold Inc., to officially submit a systematic document in relation to their request for reoperation, the minister said.
'This week, we will come to a decision on whether we will give Freeport permission to restart the open pit,' he said.
In addition, Jero reiterated that Freeport's underground mining facility, the Deep Ore Zone (DOZ), which usually produced 80,000 tons of ore per day or 36 percent of Freeport's daily production, would remain closed until further notice.
The DOZ facility was placed in the spotlight in late May as a truck driver named Herman Wahid was buried after wet ore material at the DOZ facility covered his truck. The truck operator died after receiving medical treatment at Tembagapura Hospital in Papua.
The incident occurred only two weeks after a cave-in on May 14 at the company's underground training facility near its Big Gossan mine site that killed 28 workers, the company's deadliest incident in decades of operations in Indonesia.
The government formed an investigation team ' consisting of local mining experts under the leadership of Ridho Wattimena, current head of the mining engineering graduate program at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) ' to inspect Freeport's safety standards.
Citing investigators' findings, which he said he already obtained, Jero said the Big Gossan incident occurred due to ground movement resulting from the weathering of the land. 'With that, I asked the team to thoroughly inspect all underground mining sites in Indonesia, not just Freeport but also others such as [the publicly listed] PT Aneka Tambang,' he said.
Freeport Indonesia spokesperson Daisy Primayanti said the company would wait for Jero to announce the decision on whether it could restart production activities at the open mine site or not.
As previously reported by local media, Freeport claimed it had lost an opportunity to produce three million pounds of copper and 3,000 troy ounces of gold per day since May 14 as operations were shut down amid the investigation.
The situation caused Freeport to face losses of US$18 million per day.
Last week, the Arizona-based Freeport declared force majeure as it could not meet the obligations to ship concentrate from its mine to its customers.
Freeport will unlikely meet its production target of 1.3 million troy ounces of gold by year's end, up by 44.4 percent from the 900,000 troy ounces the mining firm booked in 2012, amid its operations shutdown. (asw)
