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Pure gold
Newmont Mining Corporation’s Boddington mine in Western Australia is set to be the biggest producing mine in the country, but is not losing sight of its ethical responsibilities, David Hendricks hears
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ustralia is a land blessed with natural resources. It is the world’s second largest producer of gold, with 58 producing gold mines, of which the Super Pit, a Newmont/ Barrick Gold JV at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, is currently the largest. But not for long. For its part, Denver, Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corporation is the world’s second-largest single gold mining company, with significant assets or operations in the United States, Australia, Peru, Indonesia, Ghana, Canada, New Zealand and Mexico. The Asia Pacific region will shortly become the company’s largest production region when the Boddington mine in Western Australia overtakes the Super Pit. Officially reopened on 3 February 2010 the mine is expected to become Australia’s largest gold mine once it reaches full production.
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Newmont Asia Pacific
Newmont Asia Pacific
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“For a while we’ll be producing nearly half the volume of Newmont’s global gold output— approximately two and a half million ounces annually,” says Tim Netscher, senior vice president of Asia Pacific operations. “Of course, gradually we’ll have projects coming up in other
regions, and the volume from this mine relative to the company’s total production will go down. And Boddington will also produce a fair amount of copper.” Mining began at Boddington in 1987, when Billiton (now BHP Billiton) was the main owner and also owned the Worsley Alumina refinery, a largescale processing plant about 150 kilometres away on the coast. Boddington has changed ownership over the years, and in 2001, when the market for gold was in decline, mining at Boddington was stopped and a maintenance program put into effect until 2006, when an expansion was begun by joint venture partners Newmont Boddington Limited (two-thirds) and AngloGold Ashanti Australia Limited (one-third). Three years later Newmont bought out its partner. Since the best gold at Boddington has been mined in its early years, the remainder is a lowergrade ore, and the priority now is to move and process large volumes of material. The mine is sizable enough to allow a large-scale operation, with the processing plant within conveying distance from the mine. “The mine has to be large in order
Newmont Asia Pacific
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“For a while we’ll be producing nearly half the volume of Newmont’s global gold output—approximately two and a half million ounces annually” to make the economics work,” says Netscher. “The key to success is sufficient scale and world-class operating techniques, in terms of double-sided loading of trucks, efficiency in use of the amount of cyanide per ton of gold, and other measures. “We have benchmark standards that we have to deliver to. We’re mining around one gram of gold per ton of ore, with large-scale equipment. At full production, we’ll be moving 10 million tons of material per month. In a month, we will process about what we process at our Jundee and Tanami mines in one year, and at Waihi in two years. That gives an indication of the size of the processing plant. The only other mining operation this size in our portfolio that moves comparable quantities of material is Batu Hijau in Indonesia.” Netscher reflects with pride on the evolution the mining industry has undergone over the decades. With over 35 years’ experience in the business himself, including gold, copper, nickel, cobalt, coal and platinum group metals in South Africa, Indonesia, the US and Australia, he’s seen the giants like Newmont embrace a smarter way of mining, learning a better way of using resources, of improving energy consumption, water use, safety, relations with local communities and indigenous peoples, environmental concerns and regulations, sustainability, and the other factors that are changing the image of an industry that historically had a track record of being not exactly the most socially and environmentally responsible.
“To put it into context, I’m spending more than half my time on what we call the soft issues. And the same applies to my counterparts in Newmont’s other regions. If we’re developing a new mine project, associated with it are hard measures such as on-time delivery, on-budget delivery, fit for purpose and so on. In this industry 25 or 30 years ago, that would have been typical. Today it’s less than half the focus, because the majority of our effort is on those other issues. And we have no choice ethically or legally except to do those properly. Quite frankly, it takes years to build a company’s reputation, plank by plank by plank, and it takes only one or two incidents to destroy that reputation, so you don’t want to get into those situations. You simply have no choice but to devote the time to them. “I’ve been very fortunate in my career,” Netscher continues, “in that I’ve been exposed to those soft issues in various countries, so I understand cultural sensitivity and I honestly believe in those things. I couldn’t work in this industry if I was destroying the environment or if I wasn’t advancing local and indigenous people. Whenever I leave a job or a project, I want to leave that community in a better position than it was in before I got there, across the entire spectrum of issues. And if I don’t believe that honestly myself, then it’s time to hang up my boots. And I look for that sort of thing in the people I hire as well.” www.newmont.com/asia-pacific
NEWMONT ASIAPACIFIC www.newmont.com/asia-pacific