Anglo American has released its Q4 production results, outlining a “broadly flat production” compared to Q4 of 2020.
“Our production was broadly flat compared to Q4 of 2020, with our operating levels at approximately 95% of normal capacity through the year, largely due to the ongoing Covid related effects on the operating environment,” said Mark Cutifani, Chief Executive of Anglo American in a media release.
“Production in Q4 benefited from higher rough diamond production at De Beers, a return to pre-Covid production levels at our open cut metallurgical coal mines and improved mining performance at Amandelbult which resulted in higher metal in concentrate production from our PGMs business. At our copper operations, Collahuasi’s production increased as a result of strong plant performance and planned maintenance in the comparable period of 2020.”
A slight drop in production of iron ore, nickel and manganese ore was reported.
In October 2021, Anglo American published its Climate Change Report, outlining clear plans to move to carbon neutral operations and to halve Scope 3 emissions by 50% by 2040.
The company completed the sale of Cerrejón to Glencore in January 2022, marking the final stage of its exit from thermal coal operations.
Despite the slight drop in copper production in Q4 2021, Anglo American reported big plans on the copper front for 2022.
“As we move into 2022, we are pleased with the construction progress at Quellaveco, our new copper mine in Peru. We are on track and within budget, we mined our first ore in October 2021, and we are expecting our first production of copper concentrate in the middle of this year,” said Mr Cutifani.
“In the first quartile of the cost curve, we expect Quellaveco to produce 120,000-160,000 tonnes of copper production in 2022 and to average 300,000 tonnes per year for the first ten years at full production.”
