Chile’s Codelco, the world’s No. 1 copper producer, has cancelled a $1 billion contract awarded in November to a consortium led by Japan’s Marubeni to construct and operate a desalination plant to supply water to the miner’s Chuquicamata, Radomiro Tomic and Ministro Hales divisions in the country’s arid north.
“Between awarding the tender and signing the contract, we identified adjustments to be made to the project, prompting a decision to redefine the tender, which will take place within the next 24 months,” it said in the statement.
Construction on the plant, with an initial capacity of 840 litres per second, was due to start in the first quarter of 2020, to be fully operational in 2022.
Codelco, which hands over all of its profits to the state, holds vast copper deposits, accounting for 10% of the world’s known proven and probable reserves and about 11% of the global annual copper output with 1.8 million metric tonnes of production.
Production decline, together with lower copper prices and higher costs, saw the company’s annual profits drop by a third last year to $2 billion, not counting paper losses worth almost $400 million, as it wrote down the value of its assets, including its Ventanas smelter and the open pit at its Salvador division.
The company has been struggling this year to keep up its annual output of about 1.7 million tonnes mainly as a consequence of unusual floods in the Atacama Desert, lengthy maintenance shutdowns at two smelters and a two-week strike at Chuquicamata, among other issues.
More to come…
from MINING.COM https://ift.tt/35LZzjy
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