Antinuclear

Under a $30 billion expansion plan shelved in late 2012, BHP was last year to have started construction on the project, which would involve digging the world’s ­biggest open pit. Yesterday, the company showed how far away any decision to expand was when it fleshed out comments made in September by chief executive ­Andrew Mackenzie that expansion would need a technological breakthrough. In documents filed with the federal Environment Department yesterday, BHP kicked off the approvals process for a trial plant to test heap-leaching of copper and uranium ores as a lower-cost ­alternative to the previous ­expansion plan. If all goes to plan, the earliest a demonstration plant would start construction is July next year, with a three-year operation period targeted to start in October 2016. “While the application is for a trial, a successful trial will not necessarily lead to a full-scale heap-leach project,” BHP said. “Further, the extent and ­nature of any potential full-scale project is not known at this stage.”

The application is only to study processing the ore, with no mention of how BHP would ­access the deep orebody…………

Under previous government-approved plans, BHP had been planning a staged increase in annual production to a world-class 750,000 tonnes of copper and 19,000 tonnes of uranium, the latter being problematic given the collapse in prices and demand for the nuclear material in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The big-bang approach to expansion was abandoned by BHP in August 2012 in line with the new era of capital austerity that swept the industry in response to weaker commodity prices. It involved the development of a super pit which would have taken more than five years to complete, with the Olympic Dam orebody sitting under 400m of overburden. The lack of cash flow during the time it would take to develop the open-cut mine ­spooked both BHP and the ­market, where agitation for greater shareholder returns over more big expansions has been become the new mantra. South Australia had been banking on the original $30bn plan to underpin an economic surge for the struggling state. Mr Mackenzie undertook in September to update the state on the way forward for Olympic Dam inside of a year. The investigation of the heap-leach option has been an open ­secret, with laboratory test work at Wingfield in suburban Adelaide under way since the expansion was canned….. In order to test the processing method at a larger and more integrated scale, BHP has lodged an application for assessment by the federal and South Australian governments to build and operate a demonstration plant on the existing mining lease at Olympic Dam. “Should approval be granted, and subject to BHP approvals, construction of the demonstration plant is expected to commence in the second half of (calendar) 2015, with a projected trial period of 36 months which is expected to commence in late 2016,’’ the company said. The heap-leach trial is only part of the thought process BHP has to go through to determine the best, and lowest-cost, way to maximise returns from Olympic Dam, one of the world’s biggest deposits of copper and uranium. The initial plan was supported by a mine-life capability from the underlying resource base of more than 40 years. BHP has yet to elaborate on what the move towards a heap-leach operation would mean for the end products produced at Olympic Dam. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/olympic-expansion-years-away-says-bhp/story-e6frg8zx-1227004910155