Grasberg Mine

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Grasberg opencast mine
General information about the mine
Grasberg mine.jpg
View of the open pit (2007)
other names english Grasberg mine
Mining technology Open pit mine on 2.4 km²
Funding / year 660,000 (2005) t
Rare minerals Promote
Information about the mining company
Operating company Freeport-McMoRan
Start of operation 1973
Funded raw materials
Degradation of copper
Greatest depth 300 m
overall length 2000 m
Geographical location
Coordinates 4 ° 3 '10 "  S , 137 ° 6' 57"  E Coordinates: 4 ° 3 '10 "  S , 137 ° 6' 57"  E
Grasberg opencast mine (Moluccas-Papua)
Grasberg opencast mine
Location Grasberg opencast mine
province Papua
Country Indonesia
Satellite image of the open pit (2005)

The Grasberg mine is the largest gold mine and at the same time the copper mine with the lowest extraction costs in the world. It lies in the to Indonesia belonging West New Guinea (West Papua). The edge of the open pit is at an altitude of 3,900 m above sea level, the bottom at around 3,600 m. The diameter of the hole is 1.5 to 2.0 km. The open pit mine is Freeport-McMoRan's central resource and the source of the greatest wealth and long-term environmental degradation in Western New Guinea and Indonesia. Critics of the open pit include the Papuan indigenous population and various non-governmental organizations , environmental protection and human rights groups.

location

Freeport area with adjacent Lorentz National Park. Purple: spoil dump

The Grasberg mine is located in western New Guinea in the Pacific Ring of Fire at an altitude of 4270  m in the immediate vicinity of the highest mountain in Oceania, the Carstensz pyramid . The concession area is bounded to the east and north by the Lorentz National Park and to the south by the Arafura Sea . The Ok Tedi , Lihir , Porgera and Panguna open-cast mine operated by Ok Tedi Mining Limited are located in the same geological fault as Grasberg .

Precipitation in this region is extremely high: 4,000–5,000 mm annually in the open-cast mine complex and up to 11,000 mm in the lowlands. The rainy season lasts from September to May.

history

discovery

The deposit was discovered in 1936 by the Dutch geologist Jean-Jacques Dozy , who was exploring oil wells for Shell , while attempting to climb the peaks of the Jayawijaya Mountains. At an altitude of 3700 meters, in a mountain landscape made of light limestone, he discovered a striking black mountain about 130 meters high in the shape of a tooth made of gold-bearing copper ore , which he called Erzberg ( Dutch Ertsberg ). In an inaccessible high valley, 120 km from the coast, this copper deposit was like a "mountain of gold on the moon".

The record was forgotten by World War II , and it was not until 20 years later that the report was rediscovered by geologist Forbes Wilson . Wilson was looking for Freeport to nickel . During his expedition with Del Flint in 1960, the great copper deposits of the Ertsberg were rediscovered. The copper content was a remarkable 2.5 percent with 0.75 grams of gold and 9 grams of silver per ton of ore. A total of 32 million tons of ore were later mined.

Exposure

With the permission of the Indonesian government for copper mining , a mine was opened in 1973 . The 100 km long access road built by Bechtel is a technological masterpiece, it was the most difficult project of the largest US construction company. It was not until the Vietnam War that helicopter technology ( Bell 204 ) advanced in the mid-1960s to make the project technically possible. To build the road, lumberjacks were roped through the treetops to cut clearings, where small bulldozers, dismantled into individual parts, were then set down to make the jungle passable. Technical difficulties included helicopter crashes and heavy equipment sunk in the swamps. Two tunnels with a total length of 1.7 km had to be built. Freeport was close to giving up several times. The press called the project "Mission Impossible" - the impossible mission. The city ​​of Tembagapura ("Copper City ") was built for the miners 10 km below the opencast mine at an altitude of 2062  m . In 1995 Suharto opened the Kuala Kencana ("Gold River"), which was built for $ 500 million in the middle of the jungle for 20,000 residents .

Besides Japan, Aurubis AG (formerly Norddeutsche Affinerie AG) was one of the first buyers of the ore concentrate .

In 1988 the mining of the Grasberg deposit, already discovered by Dozy, began at an altitude of 4270 meters, two kilometers from the Ertsberg; Over a billion tons of ore with 1 percent copper and 1.2 grams of gold per ton of ore. Freeport has since owned a world-class deposit with the largest gold reserves in the world . The technical challenges were enormous again. The ore extraction could continuously be increased to 238,000 tons per day (2005). Besides Chuquicamata , Grasberg is the largest open pit copper mine in the world.

Including the spoil, over 700,000 tons of material are moved every day. At this rate, the Cheops pyramid, estimated at 6.25 million tons, would have been removed in nine days.

In 2005, extracted 660,000 tons of copper brought in 2.7 billion US dollars . 79 tons of gold mined resulted in $ 1.277 billion. Of the total income, two thirds came from the proceeds from copper and one third from gold.

criticism

Grasberg was exposed to attacks by the Liberation and Independence Movement Organasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), as the open pit mine is one of the most important sources of income in Western New Guinea. Freeport is the largest taxpayer in Indonesia, but does not comply with American or Indonesian environmental laws, rather it poisons rivers and lakes right next to Lorentz National Park . Neither the first contract from 1967 nor the successor contracts from 1991 and 1994 contain environmental requirements. For a long time there was no compensation for the traditional landowners, the tribes of the Amungme and Mimika .

Payments to local Indonesian military that Freeport claims to have carried out for its safety have come under fire. Freeport is thus brought into indirect connection with the human rights violations of the TNI and KOPASSUS in western New Guinea.

environmental pollution

Freeport's concession area. Violet in the River: Overburden (2003)

More than 238,000 tons of toxic treatment residues are transported daily through the Aghawagon and Otomona rivers and disposed of in the Ajkwa River. Copper is particularly damaging to aquatic life, it blocks biochemical processes of gill breathing . Freeport considers an equation with the Ok Tedi opencast mine in Papua New Guinea , which caused an environmental disaster , to be unfounded, as only 128 km of river and 450 km² area are affected, a dam was built, and only 500 people lived in the affected area no cyanide is used to process ore. The practice of river disposal (English " riverine disposal ") is banned in the United States and other industrialized mining countries because of their long-term environmental damage . Indonesia also issued such a ban in 2001. While in the false-color satellite image of the Akjwa only a few places show the violet coloring, only a single concrete-gray area can be seen from the aircraft on which nothing is growing. While Freeport operates pipelines for fuel and ore concentrate between the port and the opencast mine, the company argues that it is not possible to build a pipeline for the overburden due to the risk of landslides.

In addition to the spoil, acidic tailings water is the main environmental problem. When ores such as copper-containing chalcopyrite are weathered , sulfur is oxidized to sulfuric acid. The remaining hole in the Ertsberg opencast mine is filled with acidic, turquoise-colored water containing copper. The weathering of the heaps represents a contaminated site. The Amungme's Wanagan Lake has already been polluted. Groundwater pollution was also measured in the Lorentz National Park .

The acid pile runoff is exacerbated by the practice of high grading : only the richest ore batches are used. This reduces the production costs and improves the profit. Because of the above-average metal content of the Grasberg ores, the residual copper, gold and acid-producing sulphide content is particularly high.

Journalists and independent observers are not allowed to enter the mine or the rivers that dispose of waste. Therefore there are no independent measurements. A 2002 study commissioned by Freeport will not be made available to the public. Only the Indonesian Ministry of Environment Protection is said to have had access to the concession area since 2005.

Because of serious and irreversible pollution, violation of international laws and Freeport's lack of transparency, the Norwegian State Pension Fund has considered holding Freeport shares in its portfolio to be ethically unacceptable since 2006. On September 10, 2008, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance announced that it would sell £ 500 million in shares in the Rio Tinto Group , which has a 40 percent stake in the operation of the mine, from the pension fund for active participation in the pollution of the environment.

Accidents, strikes and blockades

In July 2011, the Indonesian Miners 'Union called for a wage increase of about $ 1.50 an hour to bring wages into line with foreigners' wages. The strike halted production for a week, causing the mine water to rise. According to analysts, this strike, combined with bad weather and labor disputes in Chile, caused the price of copper to rise worldwide.

In May 2013, 28 miners were killed when a stretch of road collapsed .

On October 1, 2014, 2,000 demonstrators blocked the entrance and asked the management to ensure more security after 4 miners were killed in a collision between a car and a heavy duty vehicle (SKW) on September 27 .

See also

literature

  • Jean-Jacques Dozy : From the highest peak to the deepest pit. Discovery and development of gold and copper ore deposits of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. In: Bulletin for Applied Geology. Vol. 7, No. 1, 2002, pp. 67-80, doi : 10.5169 / seals-223646 .
  • Danny Kennedy, Pratap Chatterjee, Roger Moody: Risky Business - The Grasberg Gold Mine . Ed .: Project Underground. Berkeley May 1998 ( [1] [PDF; 800 kB ; accessed on May 4, 2017]).
  • Denise Leith: The Politics of Power. Freeport in Suharto's Indonesia. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu HI 2002, ISBN 0-8248-2566-7 (Also: Sydney, University, Dissertation, 2000).
  • George A. Mealey: Grasberg. Mining the Richest and Most Remote Deposit of Copper and Gold in the World, in the Mountains of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, New Orleans LA 1996, ISBN 0-9652890-0-1 .
  • Jane Perlez, Raymond Bonner: Below a Mountain of Wealth, a River of Waste. The Cost of Gold, The Hidden Payroll. In The New York Times , December 27, 2005.
  • Forbes Wilson: The Conquest of Copper Mountain. Atheneum, New York NY 1981, ISBN 0-689-11153-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leith: The Politics of Power. 2002, p. 38. When it was closed in 1989, Panguna on Bougainville was the largest open-cast copper mine in the world.
  2. ↑ The only known other mines with river disposal outside of Russia and China are Ok Tedi and Porgera in Papua New Guinea.
  3. ↑ Norway blacklists miner Rio Tinto. In: news.bbc.co.uk. September 10, 2008, accessed on August 23, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Indonesia: Papuan copper miners end Freeport strike. In: bbc.com. July 13, 2011, accessed May 4, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Miners block huge mine in Indonesia. In: orf.at. October 1, 2014, accessed May 4, 2017 .