Freeport Indonesia has resumed open-pit mining at its massive Grasberg mine in Papua, two weeks after shutting it down following one of the worst accidents in industry history in Indonesia, a company spokeswoman said Wednesday.
“Operations at the Grasberg open-pit mine began on Tuesday, though not at full capacity,” Daisy Primayanti, vice president of corporate communications, told The Wall Street Journal.
She said current operations were well less than half the capacity of the mine—one of the world’s largest open-pit copper mines and the largest gold mine–but added that work would be ramped up in the coming days.
She also said operations at the company’s nearby underground mines, which produce far less ore, remained closed as personnel continue to inspect safety and carry out maintenance on tunnels.
“We will resume underground operations once we’ve completed a safety inspection,” she said, adding that a “preliminary inspection” had already been completed and that investigations into the accident would occur later.
Freeport is in the process of finalising a team to carry out an investigation. The government is forming its own investigation team.
Ms. Primayanti said unions agreed last weekend to the resumption of operations at Grasberg.
Copper on the London Metal Exchange fell Wednesday amid early reports that operations at Grasberg would resume. At 1008 GMT, LME 3-month copper was 0.8% lower on the day at $7,266.50 a metric tonne.
“This comes sooner than expected as the Indonesian government had indicated that operations would remain halted pending an investigation,” Deutsche Bank analysts said Wednesday.
Freeport Indonesia, a subsidiary of Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, usually produces 220,000 metric tonnes of ore each day at its remote, high-altitude Papua mines, with about 140,000 metric tonnes coming from the Grasberg mine.
Open-pit mining at Grasberg will end late 2016, but an underground mine below it is expected to yield the same amount or slightly more ore, about 160,000 metric tonnes a day, he said.
With other underground operations in the area, ore production will total about 240,000 tonnes a day, the company has said.
Freeport last week recovered the final bodies of 28 workers killed May 14 when an underground tunnel collapsed near one of its mines in the remote mountains of Papua province. The accident occurred outside of production areas, but Freeport halted operations at all its area mines, including at Grasberg more than two kilometers away.
