Freeport appoints Mitsubishi as partner in smelter project
Tuesday, January 6 2015 - 01:22 AM WIB
?The company has just made a request to change partner. It is now teaming up with Mitsubishi,? said Director General of Mineral and Coal R. Sukhyar, adding that the government was assessing the proposed change.
He said that the change was made as Freeport revises upward the annual input capacity of the planned domestic copper cathode smelter from the initial 1.6 million tons of copper concentrates to 2 million tons, thus increasing the output capacity to 500,000 tons of copper cathode from 400,000 tons per year.
President Director of PT Freeport Rozik B. Sutjipto was quoted by Bisnis Indonesia as saying that the increase in the input capacity was in line with the copper concentrates production level in 2021.
He added that the investment requirement for the planned smelter remains at the initial estimate of around $2.3 billion, or could even be lower, despite the increase in capacity as Mitsubishi has the necessary technology.
PT Freeport, a subsidiary of US Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, has been obliged by the government to build domestic smelter by 2017. Progress of the project, however, remains slow, prompting the government to give a warning to the company to make significant progress quickly or risked its export permit be suspended. Freeport has yet to decide the location of the planned smelter, although the company was considering Gresik (in East Java) and Papua. (*)