Puan & Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Visit the World’s Largest Underground Mine in Papua

Jakarta –

Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Arifin Tasrif accompanied the Chair of the Indonesian DPR, Puan Maharani, and a number of other DPR members to visit the PT Freeport Indonesia (PTFI) mining site in Papua. After receiving an explanation about mining by PTFI President Director Tony Wenas on Saturday evening, the group left for the Grasberg open pit and underground mines on Sunday (10/12) morning.

Quoted from the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources website, Monday (11/12/2023), PTFI mining is one of the most innovative and interesting mining work areas. The Grasberg Mine is located at an altitude of 4280 meters above sea level (masl) which is also the area with the highest rainfall in the world, namely 200 inches per year.

Apart from visiting the Grasberg open pit mine, the DPR group and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources visited the processing plant, underground mine, which is the largest underground mine in the world.

The Grasberg Mine is at an altitude of +4,200 meters above sea level. In this place, mining uses the open mining method, making it possible to use large heavy equipment such as shovels and large trucks (haul trucks) to mine material. Since 2020, the Grasberg open pit mine is no longer operating.

Meanwhile, PTFI’s underground mine is currently the largest in the world and is located at an altitude of +2,500 – +3070 meters above sea level. Freeport Indonesia has now entered the era of underground mining. Underground mines currently actively operating are Grasberg Block Cave, Deep Mill Level Zone (DMLZ) and Big Gossan.

After being processed in a processing plant (Mill) by crushing, grinding and flotation, it produces concentrated sludge. Next, it flows through a 110 km (74 mi) long pipeline to the drying plant. Here, mud containing copper, gold and silver is dried to a water content of 9%. This dry concentrate will later be sent entirely to the smelting and refining factory in Gresik, East Java by sea.

The operational supporting city in the lowlands is Kuala Kencana City which was inaugurated on December 5 1995. With an area of ​​17,000 Ha, Kuala Kencana is designed to be an environmentally friendly city, a unique and beautiful city, and is the first city in Indonesia to have a network of underground for water and electricity, water distribution centers, waste collection and processing.

The total number of PTFI employees currently is 6,344 employees with a composition of 2,397 Papuan employees (37.8%), 3,773 (59.5%) non-Papuan employees and 174 (2.7%) foreign employees.

Currently, the majority of PTFI shares or 51.2% of the shares are owned by the Indonesian Government. PTFI’s total social investment over the last 30 years (1992-2022) is US$ 2 billion, where in the future PTFI will continue its social investment at an average of US$ 100 million/year until 2041.

See also the Video ‘Economic Improvement and Greening in Mining’:

(acd/rrd)