Aditya Birla Minerals Ltd has decided to shut down one of its copper mines in Australia from April-end for an indefinite period.
Early this month, its board of directors took the decision, as the price level of copper did not support the cost of production at Mt. Gordon in Queensland.
This 20,000-tonne-a-year copper concentrate producing mine is one of the two copper bearing assets of Aditya Birla Minerals.
It exports concentrates to Hindalco Industries 5,00,000-tonne-a-year smelter located at Dahej in Gujarat.
In a filing to the Australian Securities Exchange, Aditya Birla Minerals said: “The production performance at the Mt. Gordon operations has been lower than expected for various reasons. At current production rates, the unit operating cost per pound of copper produced at the Mt. Gordon has become unacceptably high, which is adversely impacting the profitability of the company’s operations”.
According to a scoping study, the company said there was an opportunity to transform Mt. Gordon into a high-production operation with lower per unit operating cost.
As a strategic review of the Mt. Gordon operation under way, the board of directors has decided not to deplete the existing high-grade resources at the high unit cost. The shut down is expected to cause annualised savings of around A$15 million.
The Mt. Gordon copper operation consists of an underground mine and a copper concentrate plant.
After acquisition in 2003, Aditya Birla group commissioned a copper concentrator at the mine in 2004 to provide concentrate for use at Hindalco's operations at Dahej.
After a phase of shut down, the mine was reopened in 2011, when the LME copper price was ruling at $9,600 a tonne.