KGHM project in Chile will continue – treasury minister

Poland’s largest copper and silver producer, KGHM S.A., will likely continue its Sierra Gorda open-pit mining project in Chile’s Atacama Desert, Minister of the Polish Treasury, Henryk Kowalczyk, reported on Friday. He was speaking to the Polish press on the sidelines of the Congress 590. The project is a multi-phase extraction of copper, which began in July, 2014. Minister Kowalczyk mentioned that he had communicated with a representative of KGHM, who was in Chile at the mine. Kowalczyk said that although he thought the first phase was very likely to proceed uninterrupted, he wasn’t certain about the second phase of the project. “When I spoke to him (the KGHM rep),  he said that there was hope – he will say more when he returns.” The project is one of the largest ever undertaken by the company, which owns a 55 percent stake in the mine. It extracts 110,000 metric tons of copper ore and molybdenum daily. Phase 1 is scheduled to continue through 2034.