MiningWatchSEE: Position of Serbian copper production complex on the world market

Experts say that maximum efforts need to be made for finding opportunities of exploitation reserves quality improvement, and reduction of excavations quantities burden.

The main problem that affects the position of the copper production complex in the Republic of Serbia is the low quality of exploitation ore reserves, their increasing depth, and a large quantity of excavations needed to produce one ton of copper, thus its competitiveness with other companies in the world is on very low level. Group of authors, Radmilo Nikolic, Nenad Vusovic, Igor Svrkota and Branislav Mihajlovic, from the Technical Faculty in Bor, dealed with this topic, as well as with the the main features of world copper market analysis: consumption trends, production trends, exploiataion copper reserves – cumulative and per operational life duration, and the impact of new mining projects in the projection of balance or imbalance of supply and demand of copper in the world market.
In fact, what the authors suggest, among other things, is which statistics indicate, that copper production in Serbia, until the end of the seventies, had increase, in eighties and nineties there has been a stagnation, while during the first decade of the twenty-first century occurred significant drop in production and the collapse of once powerful system for the copper production and processing. At the beginning of the second decade of this century, and in recent years, the Republic of Serbia has taken over responsibility for the copper production and initiated a program of reconstruction, modernization and stabilization of its production capacities. This program started in 2010 to concretize itself through a comprehensive technological and organizational venture, with very comprehensive investment level. Due to the importance and impact of that program on the overall development of the Republic of Serbia as a whole, the paper gave an expert assessment of the current situation of the copper production complex on the world market, as well as projections of the future situation in accordance with the aforementioned program.
Bearing this in mind previously mentioned, experts recommend to make a maximum effort to find out the possibility of increasing the quality of exploitation reserves and reduce the load of large excavations quantities. This can be implemented, they say, in a way where copper production complex in Serbia should seriously consider a researched and partially prepared ore deposit, “Borska Reka”, which is unjustly missed in the development strategy considerations. The quality of its total ore reserves is at significantly higher levels than those included in development programs, and is not burdened with large excavated amounts per ton of produced copper.

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