Thanks Waldo. The Monitor article is interesting but very speculative ... "can neither confirm or deny". Maybe true / maybe not. I understand net impact of headings is 30 jobs lost (out of 150).
Interesting update released today (below) from Mackenzie provides more hope for medium term growth plan then has ever been the case post putting it on hold.
Angel Investor - sounds like you got it right. This is a plan of sorts that will surely get things moving again albeit slower. This sounds like the first time BHP have publicly stated & set target on a new growth plan for Olympic Dam. This equates to an increase of 30% copper production output by 2018. And an increase of 130% copper production output by 2024 (2.3 times bigger than current 195,000 tonnes a year). So not the 750,000 tones of the previous Mega project but still a major development.
Surely this will means a significant increase in population in Roxby over next 5-10 years? Medium term plan looks much brighter then it has in past 2.5 years.
Possibly a great time to grab a bargain. Always risk though given mining town nonetheless.
BELOW ARE SOME OF THE REPORTS COMING OUT FROM TODAYS INVESTOR MEETINGS
Reported in the Age:
Aside from the heap leach trial BHP is running at Olympic Dam, BHP revealed it would spend a further $US200 million increasing the processing capacity at the mine, as part of plans to grow production at the mine by 21 per cent to 235,000 tonnes of copper a year.
Separately, BHP is investigating a bigger, longer-term plan to double the amount of ore mined at Olympic Dam, which could see the amount of copper produced soar to 450,000 tonnes a year by 2024.
Mr Radclyffe said investors would be cheered to see the famous project starting to move toward development again.
"The underground at Olympic Dam has never quite hit expectations so managing to hit that capacity would make sense before you even think about then taking the next step to do something bigger," he said.
The new development plan at Olympic Dam is much smaller than the $US30 billion plan to build the world's biggest open pit, which was deferred in mid 2012.
But Mr Mackenzie said smaller, gradual developments would increasingly become the norm rather than the huge, long-dated, multibillion-dollar projects that became typical in Australia over the past decade.
"Our philosophy increasingly is 'let's not do that', let's use the whole ore body but not necessarily develop it all, to use a smaller number of sequential projects which in themselves are optimised ... and are bite-sized," he said.
http://www.thebull.com.au/articles/a/50421-olympic-expansion-compelling:-bhp.html
Reported in Australian:
BHP Billiton has increased its annual savings target over the next two financial years to $US4 billion and flagged a more than doubling of the size of the Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine in South Australia over the next 10 years.
BHP (BHP) chief Andrew Mackenzie revealed the new targets in slides released before an investor presentation in Sydney today.
BHP, which abandoned a planned $US30bn open pit expansion of Olympic Dam in 2012, said it was looking at a plan to expand the underground mine to capacity of 450,000 tonnes of copper a year by the middle of next decade. This is up from about 200,000 a year now.
It said it was planing to increase capacity at Olympic Dam by 50,000 tonnes of copper from 2017-18.
?Within our core portfolio alone we are now targeting sustainable, productivity-
led gains of at least $US4 billion (per year) by the end of 2016-17,? Mr Mackenzie said.