BHP in Peru expansion
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday January 7, 2010
BHP BILLITON'S Peruvian copper and zinc joint venture, Antamina, will undergo a massive expansion after the company approved spending $475 million on the project.BHP is the last of the four joint venture partners, which include Xstrata (with an identical 33.75 per cent share to BHP), Teck Resources (22.5 per cent) and Mitsubishi Corp (10 per cent), to sign off on its share of the project's $US1.28 billion ($1.4 billion) budget.BHP's contribution reflects its stake in the project.Speculation that an announcement was close began last week, pushing BHP's share price higher. It rose 54c, or more than 1 per cent, yesterday to $43.82, the highest level in a year.The expansion will increase the ore processing capacity by 38 per cent to 130,000 tonnes a day and extend the mine's life by six years, until 2029.Construction is expected to start within six months and first production from the expansion will begin late next year.At its results announcement in September, the chief executive of BHP, Marius Kloppers, announced that mineral reserves at Antamina had almost doubled, growing 84 per cent to 745 million tonnes.In 2008 the mine produced 358,179 tonnes of copper and 382,842 tonnes of zinc.While BHP has other copper projects in South America, including the world's largest copper producer, Escondida in Chile, Antamina is its only Peruvian operation after it sold the Tintaya copper mine to Xstrata in 2006 for $US860 million.
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