Freeport Indonesia Resumes Copper Concentrate Production, But Still Below Capacity
March 22 2017 - 1:29AM
Dow Jones News
By I Made Sentana
JAKARTA--The Indonesian unit of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. has
resumed copper concentrate production after workers at the smelter
in East Java ended a strike earlier this month, but production
remains well below normal levels.
"Our [current] production is not that big, only to match the
processing capacity of the Gersik smelter, which is only 40% of our
normal production of 160,000 metric tons a day," PT Freeport
Indonesia
spokesman Riza Pratama said Wednesday. Mr. Pratama said the
smelter is still running below its capacity.
Mr. Pratama didn't say when the company will increase production
as it is still negotiating with the government over the future of
the company's operations. He said the talks are moving in a good
direction.
Last month, Arizona-based Freeport-McMoRan threatened to take
Indonesia to arbitration, saying new rules the country imposed on
miners in January violated the terms of an operating agreement
struck in 1991 that runs through 2021.
The rules are part of a broad effort to gather more revenue from
the mining sector. Under the rules, Freeport is banned from
exporting a form of unrefined copper until it agrees to new
operating rights that would eventually force it to cede control of
Grasberg, the second-largest copper mine in the world, to
Indonesian entities.
Write to I Made Sentana at i-made.sentana@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 22, 2017 01:14 ET (05:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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