I attended the second Mount Isa Mines community information session on Tuesday night.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The session was led as usual by Glencore Australia copper boss Mike Westerman and his counterpart in zinc Greg Ashe and about 50 people attended at the Red Earth Hotel to hear what they had to say.
Internationally Glencore have just released their 2017 half year results with good financial performance with a continued focus on cost savings and operational efficiencies and the company said they remained confident medium to longer term for their key commodities copper, zinc/lead and nickel.
Northern Australia is a core part of their copper and zinc business with over 4000 jobs in the region, a spend of $930m this year on goods and services and $1.7m spent on community projects.
Mr Ashe said Lady Loretta remains closed in care and maintenance since 2015 and although the zinc price is high at the moment he said there was too much volatility to consider bringing new zinc to market so he gave no indication when that might re-open though George Fisher mine still has a good future.
Mr Ashe said the focus was on targeting the costs they could control.
Then Mr Westerman spoke about copper operation beginning by saying their safety record in 2017 was disappointing with two high potential risk incidents.
Operationally the production of copper cathode went down from 141.4 KT in the first half of 2016 to 117.6 KT in the same period in 2017, down 17 percent.
The decrease was driven by lower mixed tonnes and copper grade at Mount Isa which was partially offset by higher tonnes and grade at Ernest Henry in Cloncurry.
Mr Westerman said they were now in the lower grade ore at Mount Isa and could expect 20% reductions in the coming years but they were looking at ways to innovate to drive improved recovery in response to declining head grades.
However the ongoing viability of the smelting and refining operation was questionable due to the high costs of advance manufacturing in Australia and competition from overseas.
Mr Westerman also said most of their bulk transport was back on the railway. – Derek Barry