On Monday evening Glencore hosted the last community Mining forum for this year.
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Chief Operations Officer Copper Assets Australia for Glencore, Mike Westerman bought an important message about how Glencore mine the Mount Isa orebody.
Mr Westerman spoke about a move into a different mining method, sublevel cave mining. This method of mining will allow Glencore to target low grade copper.
“The biggest thing we are doing at the moment is changing our mining methods, every ton of ore we bring to the surface now, we get paid less for because it has less copper in it,” Mr Westerman said.
“Our current way of mining is not cost effective to support targeting low grade copper, sublevel cave mining will allow us into areas which were potentially uneconomical.”
The biggest thing we are doing at the moment is changing our mining methods, every ton of ore we bring to the surface now, we get paid less for because it has less copper in it.
- Chief Operations Officer Copper Assets Australia for Glencore, Mike Westerman
Mr Westerman explained with resource communities, mines have a start life which is the construction activity, a middle where they produce a fair bit of cash and then they have an end.
“We are mining non-renewable commodities but the important thing for us though, is that we make investments to prolong the life of the mine,” he said.
This year Glencore have rebricked the Copper Smelter which cost $30 million and have been drilling in the resource base.
“These things prove that we aren’t going anywhere.”
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Sublevel cave mining is half the cost of the current mining method.
“We are continuing to drive down the costs of mining by innovative mining methods, automation and control of our processes.”
Mr Westerman likened the Mount Isa orebody to an onion which as you peel away the layers the copper grade gets lower and lower.
“We were previously looking for copper ore at two or three percent, spending our exploration dollars there, now we are going to put our money into seeing how much of the low grade ore there is,” he said.
“If we can control our costs by changing the mining method, the life of the mine could be 2024 or further into the future.”
Currently Glencore have 200 job vacancies across their North Queensland operation.
“That’s between the Copper and Zinc operations. What we’ve been particularly successful with is what we call our indirect methods of employment such as apprentices, graduates, our Indigenous employment strategy, our school leavers program and the women in mining mentoring program,” he said.
