Jakarta. Mining giant Freeport Indonesia has said that the company remained on track to its goal of building a copper smelter in Gresik, East Java. Despite Indonesia inching closer to the elections, Freeport Indonesia vowed to keep its mind on completing the smelter on time.

According to Freeport Indonesia’s president director Tony Wenas, the company is currently at 80 percent of constructing the smelter. Freeport has set a goal for this smelter to start operations by May 2024. This smelter is expected to run at full capacity in Dec. 2024. This will also be Freeport's second copper concentrate refining and processing facility.

“Despite the elections, we will continue to run as fast as we can to finish the smelter on time,” Tony said at the 2023 BNI Investor Daily Summit held at the Hutan Kota by Plataran in Jakarta on Tuesday. 

“And also we want to make sure to implement a sustainable safe production in the upstream sector, while also upholding Freeport’s values. These values are safety, integrity, commitment, respect, and excellence [also known by the acronym SINCERE] so everything can go according to the business plan that we have prepared," Tony told the forum. 

Tony said that it would take time before the facility --which he claimed to be the world’s largest single-line smelter-- could reach full-capacity production. 

He added: “Once we begin operations, we need to warm up the furnace, among others. The concentrate feeding will only come in after the first few weeks. So overall, it takes 5-6 months until we can reach full-scale operations. … And we have informed the government about this.”

The Freeport Indonesia boss also called copper the “future of minerals”.

“The world is competing to build electric cars, and renewable power plants, whether from wind farms, solar panels, and so on. All of this requires much more copper,” Tony said, while adding that the world mainly uses copper as electrical conductors.

The 2023 US Geological Survey report shows that Indonesia hosts 23 million metric tons in copper reserves. The Southeast Asian country’s mining production stood at approximately 920,000 metric tons in 2022. Indonesia’s copper refinery production also amounted to 300,000 metric tons that year.