Qualla: Ok Tedi Mine

Ok Tedi Mine: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Mount Fubilan was described, before the drilling started, as a copper mountain with a gold cap. That phrase turned out to be literally true. For four years, from 1984 to around 1988, BHP stripped the gold off the top using cyanide extraction. Then the company went after the copper underneath — at the time thought to be the largest copper deposit in the world. Today there is no Mount Fubilan. Where the mountain used to stand there is a pit, open-cut, cut steadily deeper into the earth. Around it is a region of extraordinary rainfall, landslides, and earthquakes, at altitudes above 2,000 meters in the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea. None of the conditions are friendly to mining. The mine was built anyway.

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Ok Tedi Mine: A Mountain Built for Mining, Almost

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Exploratory drilling in the area began in the 1970s, run by the Kennecott Copper Corporation. In the early 1980s, the Australian mining company BHP secured a special mining lease. The first gold was mined in 1981. Bechtel, in a joint venture, handled the engineering, procurement,...

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Ok Tedi Mine: The Pit, the Pipe, the Port

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The operation is at industrial scale even by global mining standards. Two SAG mills, each with two associated ball mills, grind ore into copper concentrate slurry. The slurry is piped 137 kilometers southeast to the port town of Kiunga, on the Fly River, along the Kiunga-Tabubil ...

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Ok Tedi Mine: The Tailings Question

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. A proper tailings dam was specified in the original environmental plan. Construction began. In 1984, an earthquake brought the half-built dam down. BHP argued that rebuilding would be too expensive; the PNG government, with the separate disaster of the Panguna mine closure fresh ...

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Ok Tedi Mine: The Wopkaimin, Before and After

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The mine sits on country that belonged, and belongs, to the Wopkaimin people, a Min-speaking group with limited pre-mining exposure to the outside world. During regulatory negotiations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, PNG government negotiators were, by their own later admissio...

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Ok Tedi Mine: Nationalization and the 2025 Question

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. BHP Billiton withdrew from the mine in 2002, transferring its majority shareholding to the PNG Sustainable Development Program in direct response to the environmental disaster. After the transfer, the Program held 52%, the state of Papua New Guinea 30%, and Inmet Mining 18%. In 2...

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Image: Public domain