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View all search resultsProlonged Freeport smelter shutdown frees up scarce ore for copper market
The extended maintenance shutdown at Freeport's Manyar smelter in Gresik has forced the mining giant to offload 100,000 tonnes of copper concentrate to the global market, offering timely respite amid an unprecedented shortage of the raw material.
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The newly inaugurated Gresik smelter in East Java operated by PT Freeport Indonesia, the world's largest integrated precious metal refinery, appears in this handout photo taken and released on March 17, 2025, by the Executive Office of the President. (AFP/Indonesian Presidential Palace)
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T Freeport Indonesia (PTFI) has confirmed that repairs to the oxygen plant at its Manyar smelter in Gresik, East Java, have extended the facility’s downtime following a monthlong maintenance shutdown, limiting its intake of copper concentrate from the mining giant’s Grasberg mine in Central Papua.
The outage has prompted United States parent company Freeport-McMoRan Inc. to sell unusually large volumes of copper ore on the global market, providing short-term relief to other smelters that were experiencing a historic supply squeeze.
Katri Krisnati, vice president of corporate communications at PTFI, said the oxygen plant glitch had prevented the Manyar smelter from processing some of the copper concentrate from Grasberg.
The Manyar smelter has an annual refining capacity of 1.3 million tonnes and is operated by PT Smelting, which is 65 percent owned by PTFI and 35 percent by Japan’s Mitsubishi Materials Corporation.
“This start-up delay is estimated to leave around 100,000 tonnes of concentrate unprocessed,” Katri said on Tuesday, as quoted by Bisnis.com. She declined to specify how long the repairs would take, saying that the company was still assessing the resulting impact on upstream production.
The effects of the outage have reverberated across the global copper market.
According to Bloomberg, Freeport-McMoRan has been forced to offload an unexpectedly large volume of up to 100,000 tonnes of Grasberg concentrate following the extended shutdown, offering a short-term boost to smelters worldwide struggling with a historic raw material shortage.
