Rio Tinto seeks to speed up Mongolia copper and gold mine

RIO Tinto wants to speed up development of a copper and gold mine in Mongolia that's set to become one of the world's largest.

The global miner said today it is committed to the major development in Mongolia, and one in Guinea, after announcing a major expansion of its operations in Australia's Pilbara region.

Rio Tinto chief executive Tom Albanese told the ABC's Inside Business program today that he was now focusing on all the work Rio was doing in Australia, but that the company had a global footprint.

“Our strategy is to look at our best first-tier, large, long-life operations on a global basis, and that's where operations like Simandou (an iron ore project in Guinea, Africa) would be. That's where the copper project we're building now in Mongolia would be,” Mr Albanese said.

“These are first-tier assets on a global basis. But they're in a context of roughly 85 per cent of our assets being in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.

“We will take the time to develop these mines, develop them carefully, because I think they can be a very important part of our next generation of mines. And, I would like to get Simandou first production in the next five years, and again we're working on the ground to do just that.”

Mr Albanese said Rio was committed first and foremost to building its joint-venture Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in Mongolia to Rio Tinto standards and as quickly as possible.

“It's a first-class mine being built on time, and I'd like to see it actually get sped up if we can. First production by 2013.” he said.

“It's on track as we speak, so we're building the mine today.”

Oyu Tolgoi is set to be one of the world's largest mines, with 1,387,430,000 tonnes of resources in the measured and indicated categories.

Last week, Rio said $3.2 billion would be spent expanding its iron ore infrastructure in Western Australia's Pilbara region to lift annual capacity to 283 million tonnes.

Rio last week also approved a final feasibility study into increasing Pilbara production capacity to 333 million tonnes per annum.

Rio said the investment would support port and rail infrastructure works around Cape Lambert.

Rio Tinto would contribute $US2.1 billion, while its joint-venture partners would pay the remainder.

AAP

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