No Joke, Indonesia's Copper Mine Is a World Barometer!
Indonesia apparently has a mine that serves as a barometer for world mining. The mine in question is the Grasberg mine in Tembagapura, Mimika Regency, Central Papua, which is managed by PT Freeport Indonesia.
PTFI President Director Tony Wenas said this assessment is not without reason. When the open pit was operating, the Grasberg mine was the second largest open pit copper mine in the world. Unsurprisingly, PTFI is the second largest copper producer in the world and the largest gold producer in the world.
Although, since the end of 2019, the Grasberg open pit has been halted and has now transitioned to underground mining.
“Grasberg or Freeport Indonesia is seen by the international world as one of the barometers of copper mining. Firstly, when the open pit mine was operating, it was the second largest copper mine in the world, the second largest open pit in the world. We as a copper producer are also the second largest in the world, and as a gold producer we are the largest in the world,” Tony explained in Tembagapura, Central Papua, in CNBC Indonesia’s Mining Zone programme, quoted on Friday (21/8/2026).
With the large production from the Grasberg mine, Freeport has inevitably become a focus of world attention. He said that any operational disruption at Grasberg has a direct impact on the rise and fall of commodity prices on the international market.
For example, the landslide incident at the Grasberg Block Cave (GBC) underground mine in September 2025 resulted in the temporary suspension of mining operations. As a result, copper commodity prices on the global market were pushed up due to a shortage of supply from the Freeport mine.
Therefore, he also emphasised the importance of certainty regarding the extension of PTFI’s Special Mining Business Permit (IUPK) after 2041. This will have an impact on the certainty of world copper supply in the future.
“So this raises hopes in the international world, not only for investors who are interested in investing either directly in PTFI or through Freeport-McMoRan by buying its shares and so on. And of course there are also parties with an interest in ensuring whether there will be copper 15 years from now,” he said.
“Because once we stop production, this will certainly shake the market as well, the world market. When we had the incident in September and we decided to stop all operations to focus on searching for victims who had not yet been found, there was a slight upheaval,” he added.
Currently, the company is focusing on restoring production capacity to 100% as well as developing the Kucing Liar underground block, which requires a total investment of Rp 72 trillion.
The new block is projected to be able to produce 7 billion pounds of copper and 6 million ounces of gold to maintain stable production levels at 240,000 tonnes of ore per day.
“The hope is of course for certainty, because mining conservation means that if there are still resources underneath that cannot be extracted, it should be continued,” he explained.
PTFI also operates the world’s largest single-line copper smelting facility in Gresik, East Java. Through this upstream and downstream integration, Indonesia is expected to secure strategic mineral reserves to support the global electric vehicle and renewable energy industries.
“Copper is the metal of the future. Now almost the entire world is racing to find copper because they are also racing to build renewable power plants,” he concluded.