US has second-longest mine development timeline in the world, S&P Global says
Mines in the US go from discovery to production in an average of 29 years.
The mine expansion was cancelled in 2012, as metal prices began sinking and costs rising.
The Australian government has vowed to help BHP Billiton (ASX, NYSE, LON: BHP), the world’s largest mining company, to go ahead with an estimated $33 billion expansion of its Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine, shelved last year as metal prices sank and costs rose.
“I want to ensure that as far as is humanly possible everything that government does is directed towards making it easier, not harder, for this iconic project to go ahead,” Bloomberg quotes Prime Minister Tony Abbott as saying.
But South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill is calling Abbot’s comments “a cruel hoax,” as he claims to have spoken with BHP management last week and there was no indication of any plans to resume plans on the mine.
His state is facing massive job loses as General Motors Co. (GM)’s Holden unit will stop production in 2017 after 69 years, laying off about 2,900 workers in the state and in neighbouring Victoria.
“The impracticality and the illusion of that is a bit of an unfair thing to hold in front of those workers right at this moment,” Weatherill told the Herald Sun Monday.
“We need to work with those businesses which do have the capacity to expand their operations to ensure that they do that more quickly,” he added.
In September, chief executive Andrew Mackenzie said BHP would provide an update on the shelved $30 billion project in 2014, but any expanded mine site at Roxby Downs in South Australia’s far north was unlikely without a technological breakthrough.
Doubts about the lauded project first emerged in early 2012 when BHP told markets of its intention to cut back an $80 billion capex programme. A JP Morgan research note out a few weeks later also suggested the Olympic Dam would not go ahead “for at least three or four years, if at all.”
The ambitious project in South Australia’s outback is expected to become the world’s largest uranium mine. It included the construction of 270km of powerlines, a 400 km pipeline, a new desalination plant and a 105km railway.
The Olympic Dam, Australia’s largest underground mine, currently employs over 3,500 people.
Image courtesy of BHP Billiton
Comments
Ray
I was part of a Brisbane-based team who did concept studies to mine this deposit at 1mt per day of ore. This was in about 2008 and we were bidding to obtain the design contract
Our plan was to go underground and block-cave and use Doppelmayr’s 48 degree conveyors to bring the ore to surface at about 40ktph on four conveyors.
Instead a plan was adopted to go open-pit with a fleet of something like 500 off 500 ton Cat dump trucks. This plan is fraught with impracticalities
and difficulties. They would have to go underground before long anyway.
A big nuclear, coal- or oil- fired power station will be required though, something like 6000MW. Dry-cooled. This could be a problem to the green people.
We also proposed a floating container wharf off Adelaide in 20m of water designed to load and unload a 40 ton container from the ships every
minute and using a large aerial ropeway to transport the containers to the
railhead on the shore. All this to export yellow cake in bulk.
However, It would be sensible for South Australia to enrich the yellow cake to produce fuel-rods to achieve maximum profits. Selling power station fuel rods will be a very profitable business soon. A nice high-tech facility and venture for South Australia and producing many jobs
It would be exciting if the project were to go ahead though.
So, if anyone is interested in designing this mine using block-cave, give me a
call; I still have all the concepts and early study-work.