Anglo American Clears Final Hurdle for Minas-Rio

Anglo American reported on December 21, 2012, that it had secured the removal of the third and final injunction that had been impeding construction activities at its Minas-Rio iron ore project in Brazil, allow-ing construction to proceed on the 90-km electricity transmission line that will pro-vide power for the project. Two other injunctions were removed in September, enabling construction of the primary crush-er and conveyor system and pre-stripping work to resume at the mine site and resolv-ing land access issues for the route of the 525-km slurry pipeline that will deliver ore to the Port of Açu in Rio de Janeiro state.

The Minas-Rio project is targeting pro-duction of 26.5 million mt/y of iron ore pel-let feed. Construction progress has remained on schedule for elements of the project that were not affected by legal or land access constraints. Anglo American currently antic-ipates that first ore will be delivered to port during the second half of 2014, the target date having been pushed back from a previ-ous estimate of the second half of 2013.

In a mid-November 2012 project up-date, Anglo American reported that current indications are that capital expenditures for the Minas-Rio project are unlikely to be less than the $8-billion upper end of the range of analysts’ expectations. The previous esti-mate for the project was $5.8 billion.

Anglo American is carrying out a detailed cost review to assess the impact of already announced delays and the other disruptive challenges faced by the project, which include high cost inflation across the construction industry in Brazil. The review includes an independent external assessment commissioned by the Anglo American board.

Anglo American will provide further detailed information in relation to Minas-Rio when the review has been completed and any remaining challenges affecting the project timetable have been resolved.

As featured in Womp 2013 Vol 01 - www.womp-int.com