Source : Perth Now news
The new owner of one of Australia’s deepest underground copper mines wants to double the life of the asset by digging even deeper.
The CSA mine, 14km northwest of Cobar in central-western NSW, extends almost two kilometres below the surface and has about 45 levels.
Now owned by South Africa’s Harmony Gold Mining Company, it produces high-quality processed copper concentrate, with ores averaging between three and five per cent copper.
Harmony officially took over the almost 150-year-old mine in October 2025, after acquiring its previous owner, MAC Copper, for $1.6 billion.
CSA, which takes its name from the Cornish, Scottish and Australian syndicate that kicked off operations after copper was discovered in 1871, has a mine life of 12 years.
“We’ve got a really aggressive plan to almost double that … if we get to extend the main ore body down deeper,” general manager Rob Gracey told a media group touring the site on Friday.
“If that area is extended down to two and a half kilometres, or 2.7km, you’re probably looking at about 700,000 tonnes of contained copper.”
Copper is enjoying a resurgence in demand across the world given its importance in the construction of data centres to support a booming artificial intelligence market.
The metal, which is prized for its high conductivity and heat tolerance, is trading around $US6.58 per pound, up about $US2 from a year ago.
Harmony also owns the Eva copper project in Cloncurry in northwest Queensland, which it bought in 2022.
The company has ambitions to supercharge production from CSA and Eva to a combined 100,000 copper tonnes annually between the next three to five years.
The CSA mine produced 18,000 tonnes between October and the end of June, including its best month so far, when it produced 4159 tonnes in May.
If the results are extrapolated, production is assumed at 48,000 tonnes a year, Mr Gracey said.
CSA has about 500 employees and contractors – made up of residential, fly-in, fly-out and drive-in, drive-out personnel – and is a major employer in Cobar, which has a population of about 5000.
Women make up about 22 per cent of the workforce, many of whom do the school drop-off and pick-up while driving trucks at the mine.
A media group touring CSA on Thursday visited the Moolarben coal mine, about 40km north of Mudgee in the NSW western coalfields region.
The open-cut and underground operation is owned by Yancoal, an $8 billion Australian stock exchange-listed group, which exports thermal and metallurgical coal and has 11 coal mines around NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.
The mine has about 1200 employees and contractors and worked with about 120 local suppliers in 2025, generating about $58 million in revenue.
Yancoal is majority-owned by China’s Yankuang and is also traded on the Hong Kong exchange.
It recently reported an operating profit of $328 million for the first six months of 2026, up 42 per cent from the same period in 2025.
