Published: October 12, 2018 |

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Reuters cited Mr. Mike Henry, president of operations, minerals Australia, said in an interview on the sidelines of LME Week, an industry gathering in London BHP expects a plant at its Olympic Dam mine to restart this month following repairs and the company has found a way to deliver returns from the asset as part of a focus on maxmizing productivity. “The expectation remains that we’ll have that back up and running this month. We have identified a very credible route to growing the asset,” adding the company was on track with a plan to seek board approval for “bite-sized chunks of capital (expenditure) with healthy returns”. Mr. Henry said Olympic Dam, which contains uranium oxide, copper, gold and silver, was “a wonderful ore body”, but in the latest in a series of setbacks, BHP in August announced it had shut an acid plant following a boiler tube failure, disrupting copper processing. Underground mining at the site continued as normal.

The company’s CEO said at the time Olympic Dam was the only part of the business not delivering “an acceptable return on capital”.

In Brazil meanwhile, it is still too soon to say when BHP’s Samarco iron ore operations, a joint venture with Vale , will resume output following a dam burst in late 2015. Brazil says this was its worst environmental disaster.

Source: Steel Guru

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