The board of Chile's state-owned copper company Codelco has approved a roughly US$2bn capex budget for 2009, a company representative confirmed to BNamericas.
"The investment plan is comparable to the one last year," Codelco executive president José Pablo Arellano said at the Enade business conference in Santiago on Thursday (Nov 27), according to local press.
"We expect to go ahead with a vigorous investment plan next year in spite of this difficult situation," he added.
Among Codelco's growth projects, the company is involved in ongoing expansions at its El Teniente underground mine in region VI, and Andina open-pit and underground operation in region V.
Also, the state miner this month kicked off an expansion at its Gaby mine, commissioned in May, to increase the mine's full capacity of 150,000t/y gradually over the course of 28 months by some 20,000t/y in copper cathode. The project has a price tag of US$202mn.
Codelco's output in the first nine months of this year fell 7.83% year-on-year to 1.12Mt, mainly due to lower grades and other operational challenges including violent protests by outsourced workers that thwarted production.
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