And still in South Australian copper mining, BHP Billiton has moved a step closer to making a yes or no decision on the huge Olympic Dam project.
The company yesterday gained environmental approval from the South Australian, Federal and Northern Territory governments for the $20 billion-plus expansion of the huge Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine.
BHP Billiton is expected to give the final go-ahead for the project by June 2012.
It has yet to reveal the cost of the expansion but mining analysts rank it as possibly the single biggest on the drawing board of the world’s biggest miner.
(As big as $20 billion is, it is dwarfed by the $43 billion cost of the huge Gordon LNG project in the NW of WA, while it could end up costing as much as the $25 billion first stage of the Wheatstone LNG project, also in the same area off the NW WA coast.
The South Australian approval comes only hours after the federal government also gave the project the environmental go-ahead.
Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke said in that statement that he had given the project the go-ahead "with strict conditions during operation and well beyond the life of the mine."
"BHP Billiton will be required to adhere to more than 100 stringent conditions including establishing an offset area of about 140,000 hectares, biodiversity conservation and environment protection management programs and a comprehensive compliance strategy.
"The proposal was subjected to independent expert reviews including by Geoscience Australia, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, and the Supervising Scientist," Mr Bourke said.
The South Australia state government, in announcing the project’s key approval, made it a condition that the company must start project construction within five years.
It also said it aimed to finalise an agreement on royalties and infrastructure commitments for the expansion by October 20.
"I anticipate an agreement can be reached soon," Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia’s minister for mineral resources development, said in a statement.
Under the expansion, BHP Billiton proposes to change from a shift mine to a huge open pit mine to lift ore production.
New and expanded infrastructure will include a waste rock storage facility and an expanded tailings storage facility which would operate simultaneously with the existing underground mine.
BHP Billiton projects that the proposed expansion would create more than 13,000 jobs and contribute over $45 billion to the economy in South Australia and nationally over the next 30 years.
Olympic Dam would be the worst third largest copper mine. BHP controls the biggest, the massive Escondida operation in Chile.
