Indonesia's Amman expects new copper smelter to start up in Q4

Indonesia's PT Amman Mineral Industri (Amin) anticipates commencing copper cathode production at its new smelter in West Nusa Tenggara province in the fourth quarter of 2024, its parent company, PT Amman Mineral Internasional, said July 16.

The copper smelter is designed to process 900,000 mt/year of concentrate from the Batu Hijau mine and the future Elang mine, Amman said, manufacturing 222,000 mt/year of LME grade A copper cathodes and 830,000 mt/year of sulfuric acid.

Commissioning of the smelter began June 1 and is expected to take about four to five months to complete, during which "the smelter furnace begins to be heated, and the copper concentrate will start to be fed into the smelter," Amman said.

The Batu Hijau mine, an open-pit copper-gold operation, is expected to be depleted in 2030. Amman is slated to begin developing the Elang copper-gold mine in 2027 to replace ore processing activities in Batu Hijau.

The Elang mine is projected to begin mining activities between 2031 and 2046 and has estimated open-pit ore reserves of 1.44 billion mt(opens in a new tab). A feasibility study is set to be completed in 2024.

The Batu Hijau mine has completed its seventh stage of expansion, with an eighth stage anticipated to begin ore production in 2025, thereby extending the mine's lifespan to 2030. Stage eight will introduce an additional 460 million mt of ore reserves, with a cost of around $1.54 billion.

The projected startup of Amin's copper smelter will coincide with that of PT Freeport Indonesia's Manyar smelter (opens in a new tab)in Gresik, East Java, which is scheduled to start up by the end of 2024, producing copper cathodes at a rate of about 600,000 mt/year.

Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, assessed CIF China clean copper concentrate treatment and refining charges at $4.30/mt and 0.43 cent/lb, respectively, on July 16, unchanged from the previous session.