When Jokowi Confesses Freeport Ever Reluctant To Build A Smelter In Indonesia

JAKARTA - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) said that he had been ignored by a mining company, PT Freeport Indonesia, regarding the construction of a smelter in Indonesia.

Jokowi said he had asked Freeport to build a smelter when the company had not been taken over by Indonesia.

"For years, I gave Freeport orders to build a smelter for industrialization but were never listened to. But as soon as Freeport is now 51 percent owned by SOEs, last year the smelters were immediately built because the majority already belonged to us," said Jokowi at the Silatnas and Birthday events to -19 Army Retired Army Association, Friday 5 August.

Jokowi also believes that the treasure owned by PT Freeport Indonesia could be 20 times the current amount. "We'll see how many billions of this copper will be smelted, we don't know yet. the same, 20 times what we usually send," he said.

Regarding the progress of the smelter construction in Gresik, currently, there are 10,500 pile points and concrete pouring for the structural foundations and the overall development progress has reached 34.9 percent.

To support the construction of the smelter, 3,500 construction workers were recruited, consisting of 98% of Indonesian workers, 50 percent of whom were local workers from East Java. This is expected to maintain the acceleration of such progress as early as possible.

Based on data from the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, in the construction of the smelter, there is a capacity expansion of the existing smelter by 0.3 million dmt/year by PT Smelting, as well as the processing of precious metal (precious metal refinery) which reaches 6,000 tons/year.

PTFI itself has prepared an investment in capital expenditure of US$ 3 billion for the smelter construction project.