No wonder RI has a giant gold factory, its reserves make you gawk
NEWS - Pratama Guitarra, CNBC Indonesia
31 March 2023 13:55
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - Indonesia will soon have a "giant" gold factory. Unmitigated, 50 tons or 50 thousand kilo grams (kg) of gold per year will be produced from this factory.
The gold plant referred to here is the Precious Metal Refinery (PMR) plant owned by PT Freeport Indonesia (PTFI) in the Java Integrated Industrial and Ports Estate (JIIPE) Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Gresik, East Java.
Gold production is carried out from processed by-products of copper concentrate, namely Anode Mud as much as 6,000 tons per year.
PT Freeport Indonesia's Technical Affairs and Smelting Project Support Manager Erika Silva said the plant is targeted to be operational in May 2024.
"Anode mud can produce as much as 50 tons of gold per year, 210 tons of silver per year and others to lead," Erika said when met at the JIIPE SEZ Area, Gresik, quoted Thursday (30/3/2023).
The gold plant is also part of Freeport's copper processing and refining facility (smelter). This copper plant is also the largest single-line copper plant in the world, with a copper concentrate processing capacity of 1.7 million tons per year and producing 600 thousand tons of copper cathode per year.
Until February 2023, Freeport Indonesia noted that the construction of the world's largest copper plant has reached 56.5% as targeted.
Based on CNBC Indonesia's monitoring in the field, the physical progress of the construction of the Freeport copper plant in Gresik has indeed made a lot of progress compared to the physical when Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) laid the first stone or groundbreaking in October 2021.
Erika said that her party is targeting, the completion of physical construction to be completed by the end of December 2023, followed by
pre-commissioning and
commissioning until the end of May 2024.
"Starting operations are targeted at the end of May 2024," said Erika.
Indonesia's Gold Reserves 'Giant'
The size of the gold factory that will be owned by Indonesia is inseparable from the size of the "treasure" found in the country.
Indonesia is the owner of the fifth largest gold reserves in the world, after Australia, Russia, the United States, and South Africa.
Based on USGS 2020 data processed by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM), Indonesia is recorded to have 2,600 tons of Au (gold) or 5% of the world's total gold reserves of 50,300 tons of Au.
"Indonesia has the top five gold reserves in the world, meaning that Indonesia plays an important role in providing the world's gold raw materials," wrote the 2020 Gold-Silver Booklet released by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.
Based on data from the Geological Agency of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources until the end of 2019, Indonesia's total gold ore resources were recorded at 14.96 billion tons, gold metal resources amounted to 0.01 million tons. Meanwhile, Indonesia's gold ore reserves were recorded at 3.57 billion tons and metal reserves at 0.005 million tons.
With such a large amount of resources, even gold is predicted to last for the next 268 years.
This was revealed by the Coordinator of the Working Group (Pokja) of the Mineral and Coal Commodity Master Plan Dedi Supriyanto. He said, until 2020, Indonesia's total gold ore resources reached 16 billion wet metric tons (wmt) and total ore reserves reached 4 billion wmt.
Indonesia sebentar lagi akan memiliki pabrik emas "raksasa". Tak tanggung-tanggung, 50 ton emas per tahun dihasilkan dari pabrik ini.
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