783 Figure 55– Capital intensity over time across commodity projects – USD / units produced Table 15– Examples of Historical Projects – location, throughput and delivery model Project # Location Throughput (kt/day) Year of startup Desalination included Delivery Model Phalaborwa Copper Mine South Africa 25 1977 No EPCM Kennecott Line 4 USA 77 1988 - 1992 No EP Asarco Ray USA 27.2 1992 No EPCM Cadia Australia 47 1998 No EPCM JV Los Pelambres Chile 85 1999 No EP + CM Las Bambas Peru 140 2015 No EPC QB2 Chile 142 2023 Yes EPC Over the years, the focus has been on delivering a mining project with the associated non process infrastructure such as ports, desalination plants and pipelines between the mine and coast. Projects are becoming larger due to lower grades and more remote locations with limited logistics envelopes. In South America, as projects are being developed in more remote locations where water is an issue, there has been a move to include coastal desalination plants with pipelines delivering water to the new mine sites. Another observation is that in the last 10 to 15 years there has been a move away from the traditional EPCM contract model to an EPC self-perform with direct hire. The authors have extracted historical capital costs with the intention of illustrating the changing capital profiles for projects across the three decades under review. Figure 2 illustrates how the makeup of project costs has moved in terms of percent of total installed costs. One note here is that as observed there is a difference in “Indirect costs” between EPC and EPCM. This is by design as "Indirect costs" are always larger for EPC projects, whilst for EPCM projects, the majority of indirect costs are carried by the contractors within the direct costs for the project. Figure 3 consists of three decades of data with 5 projects from the 1990’s, 4 projects from the 2000’s, 6 projects from the 2010’s and 2 projects from the 2020’sthat have been analyzed.
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