Study to determine Frieda project

By PETER ESILA
THE East Sepik Provincial Assembly will meet early next year to discuss the future of the Frieda River Project.
Governor Allan Bird spoke about the project at the 2019 PNG SME Startup Convention in Port Moresby yesterday.
Bird said his provincial government had committed half a million kina on the study conducted by experts from the province to determine the consequences the project would have on the environment and particularly the Sepik River.
“All the leaders of the province will be there, and then we will look at the study that is presented before us by our own experts, many of them are people with PhDs in mining engineering and environmental science, and then we will take our decision,” he said.
“We have the experts who are now sitting, looking at the mine plan, economics of the plan, looking at the mines in relation to all of the other things that we want to do in agriculture, looking at things like water quality, the environment, at the socio-economics of the entire project.”
Bird, however, said it was bad to just make sudden decisions, noting that it took decades of exploring Frieda River deposits and millions of dollars to do so.
“To prevent such a project from going on, I think the decision should have been taken 20 to 30 years ago,” he said.
“We are talking about a company that spent half a billion kina doing all of these assessment and to later come and just say that we are not going to listen to you, I think that sends a bad signal out to the market place, we do live in a global community.
“The danger for us is that if we do not have the facts and figures to dispute the operation of the mine based on the safety of the river, and to just come out and say ‘no’, all of the other investors that we are trying to attract to come in agriculture will turn around and say that we can’t trust this government because of what they did in the Frieda project.” The Frieda River copper-gold project is one of the largest undeveloped copper–gold deposits in the world, containing 12 million tonnes of copper and 19 million ounces of gold.
It has the potential to generate 170,000 tonnes of copper per annum, and 250,000 ounces of gold per annum.
The Frieda River Project consists of the infrastructure, copper-gold, hydroelectric and power grid projects.