RE: GEO2 Nov 2017 09:46
Cough cough Lundin Mining
BHP Billiton is scouring the world for copper to meet demand from the expected boom in electric vehicles and the rise of renewable energy.
Daniel Malchuk, president of BHP’s operations in the Americas, said that the world’s largest mining group was investing in expanding its existing copper mines and was seeking new blockbuster deposits in Latin America, North America and Australia.
The International Energy Agency believes that by 2030 there will be 160 million electric vehicles, which contain about four times as much copper as traditional petrol and diesel vehicles. Renewable energy systems need between eight and twelve times as much copper as traditional power generation, according to the Copper Development Association.
However, there are few new copper mines under construction because commodities prices slumped in 2013. Furthermore, the older the mine, the harder it has to be worked because the purity of the ore decreases.
“We want more copper,” Mr Malchuk said. “In addition to all the things we’re doing to try to extract the most out of our existing resources, we also have something we don’t talk about all that much: a very active and focused exploration programme in copper.”
The exploration efforts are leaning on high-tech approaches from the oil and gas industry, including seismic imaging. “We have more than 100 years of data in the different jurisdictions of the world,” he said.
“Today we are bringing machine-learning and complex algorithms to that data, which gives us more insight into which regions and the zones within regions that may have higher fertility, higher prospectivity.”
Mr Malchuk said that new mines took roughly a decade to develop from discovery to first production, which meant that in the near term BHP would expand production at its existing mines.
In August BHP said that it was spending $2.5 billion expanding the Spence mine in Chile’s Atacama desert, an investment that will extend the life of the mine by 50 years. Now it is looking to expand production at Olympic Dam, its vast polymetallic deposit in Australia, which contains billions of tonnes of copper, gold, silver and uranium but processes only about 12 million tonnes of ore a year.
“We’re eating that resource with a teaspoon,” he said. Similar work is under way at Escondida in Chile, the world’s largest copper mine.
ML
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