For The Second Consecutive Year, The Chilean Copper Commission Lowered Its Forecast For Chilean Copper Production Over The Next Decade.

According to the Economic and Commercial Office of the Chinese Embassy in Chile, Chile's Three O'Clock Newspaper reported on 3 January, 2024 that the Chilean Copper Commission released a report on copper production forecasts for the next ten years, predicting that Chile's copper output will peak at 6.88 million tonnes in 2029, lower than the 7.14 million tonnes and 7.62 million tonnes peaks expected in the past two years. The commission explained that the copper production forecast has been lowered again mainly due to the slow implementation of new mining investment projects, such as the Rajo Inca project, which aims to extend the operation period of the Salvadoran branch of the Chilean National Copper Company, has been delayed due to the backwardness of the technology and management, which is planned to obtain the environmental permit in January 2020, and the official start of the construction in March of the same year, but as of the end of 2022, the progress of the construction is only 42.6%. In February 2023, Chile's National Copper Company terminated the award of the contract to the CBM consortium, comprising Chilean and Belarusian companies, due to the slow progress of the project. Other projects have also experienced delays, such as the largest copper-gold-molybdenum project in the Americas, which was jointly awarded to Canadian mining company TECK and US-based Newmont Gold in 2015, which has so far failed to officially start for undisclosed reasons. The Commission also emphasised that production losses due to the epidemic have not yet been reversed and that the Chilean copper industry will not recover until 2024, hence the decline in the ten-year production forecast.

Source: China Sina.com