BHP has announced plans for a major underground expansion at its Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, significantly increasing the site’s resource base. [3, 9] The company has defined a 10.73-billion-tonne resource that could be mined using block caving, a method suited to extracting large volumes of ore. [4, 6]
The plan supports BHP’s strategy to grow copper output from its South Australian operations to about 500,000 tonnes a year by 2035. [3, 7] The block-caving proposal remains in the early assessment stages and is not yet an approved project. [6, 7] It signals BHP’s long-term commitment to increasing its exposure to future-facing commodities such as copper.