Читать книгу Indonesian New Guinea Adventure Guide - David Pickell - Страница 17

TEMBAGAPURA

A Giant

Copper Mine

in the Sky

In the shadow of glacier-capped Puncak Jaya, West Papua's highest peak, steel jaws travel along the world's longest single-span tramways, carrying up to 17-ton loads of ore across some of the most inaccessible terrain on earth. A huge mineral concentrator processes the ore into liquid slurry, which is then pumped through the world's longest slurry pipelines to a port on the mangrove flats 118 kilometers away on the coast.

With operations higher than 4,000 meters, daily rainfall, and situated in some of the strangest and most forbidding terrain in the world, this mine stands as one of the greatest engineering achievements of our time.

It is also—quite literally—a gold mine for its owners, Freeport Indonesia, majority owned by Freeport-McMoRan in Louisiana. In addition to billions of pounds of copper reserves, making it one of the five largest copper mines in the world, a recently discovered deposit now gives the mine the single largest gold reserve of any mine in the world: 27 million ounces.

[Note: Visitors are not welcome at any of the Freeport installations. Only the head office in Jakarta grants permits to tour the areas, and these are granted for professional reasons only.]

A mountain of ore

The story begins with a jet-black outcropping of ore discovered in 1936 by Dutch geologist Jean Jacques Dozy. Literally a mountain of copper, Ertsberg ("ore mountain" in Dutch) stood 179 meters above a grassy meadow, 3,500 meters up in the highest part of West Papua's rugged cordillera. High-grade ore lurked in the rock below to a depth of 360 meters. Ertsberg—or Gunung Bijih (also "Ore Mountain") as it later came to be called—was so exposed because the softer rock surrounding it had been carved away by glaciers. This was the largest above-ground copper deposit in the world.

The Freeport mines have already provided the world with 3 billion pounds of copper. The Gunung Bijih deposit, which harbored 33 million metric tons of ore, has been exhausted, and all that remains is a pit. But three additional deposits have been discovered just a stone's throw from Gunung Bijih: Gunung Bijih Timur (including two separate deposits), Dom (Dutch for "cathedral," a hill of marble), and the greatest prize of all, Grasberg (Dutch for "grass mountain").

The 91 kilometer road to Tembagapura was painstakingly cut by flown-in bulldozers.

And the future is very bright for Freeport. As of 1991, proven reserves at the mine total 447 million metric tons of ore, estimated to yield 14 billion pounds of copper, 19 million ounces of gold, and 35 million ounces of silver. At current rates of extraction, this means an annual revenue of $800 million, more than $1 million per day in profit.

Mining costs are relatively high at Freeport, now averaging 46¢ per pound of saleable copper, and falling copper prices have at times made the mine temporarily unprofitable. But now that copper stands near $1 per pound, the mine earns Freeport more than $1 million a day.

'Copper City'

Mine workers live in Tembagapura—"Copper City"—a company town of 8,700 people nestled in a 1850-meter-high valley near the ore deposits. The setting is stunning, with the western flank of Mount Zaagham providing a spectacular backdrop.

A melting pot of ethnic groups labors in the mines. A Javanese welds and reshapes the huge steel teeth of a monstrous ore crusher. A Buginese from Sulawesi checks the rollers under a long conveyor belt that brings blasted chunks of ore to the crusher. A highland West Papuan rewires a complicated fuse-box. And a team of two men from Biak efficiently maneuvers a pneumatic drill at the far end of a side tunnel to prepare a section for blasting.

Freeport employs about 6,900 people, of whom 92 percent are Indonesians. Of these, 13 percent—about 900—are native West Papuans. The company has been criticized for the relatively low number of West Papuans working there, although training programs are beginning to show improved results.

For the workers, Tembagapura is pleasant, but remote. As an Irish expat said: "All you have to think about is your work—everything else is laid out for you." And very well laid out, with modern homes following the gentle slope of the creek-split valley. After a heavy rain, and 7,600 millimeters fall each year, 50 waterfalls spring from the tropical vegetation or bare rock on the vertical face of Mount Zaagham.

Facilities at Tembagapura include schools, tennis courts, a soccer field, a complete indoor sports complex, the latest videotapes, a subsidized store, clubs and bars—including the so-called "animal bar," frequented by workers. Hard liquor is taboo, but copious quantities of beer are served.

Tram cars at the Freeport mine carry 11-17 metric tons of ore at a time along the world's longest single-span tramway to the refining plant below.

Gunung Bijih, a mountain of nearly pure copper ore, has been exhausted, leaving an open pit. But half a billion tons of ore remain.

Supplies to Tembagapura must be trucked in over a steep, narrow gravel road from Timika, 75 kilometers away in the lowlands. Just keeping the men fed is a major feat of engineering. For example, Tembagapura requires 110 metric tons of rice a month, 88 metric tons of meat, and 33 metric tons of fish. The men eat a hearty breakfast, and require 91,000 eggs every day. (Freeport's fleet of trucks uses up 200 tires a week.)

Within the relatively narrow valley, real estate is at a premium. This means that many of the married workers cannot bring their families to Tembagapura, which makes for a lot of lonely men. It was once suggested that some ladies of pleasure be "imported" and periodically checked for disease—a practice in many Indonesian company towns. But the idea was shot down.

Tembagapura has changed drastically since the early days, when a German visitor exclaimed, "Mein Gott, Stalag 17." But it is still an isolated, tight-knit community. As a Javanese jokingly said, "Irian is the Siberia of Indonesia." He was referring to being so far from home, cut off from familiar surroundings. But in Tembagapura, he could also have been referring to the cold weather. The camps of Siberia never had the creature comforts of this town, however.

Most of the Indonesians at Tembagapura are content with their lot. They work hard—9 hours a day, 6 days a week—but they get paid quite well, and they get 5 weeks off each year, with the company paying the airfare home.

Ertsberg rediscovered

In the early 1950s, Forbes Wilson, chief exploration geologist for Freeport Sulphur of Louisiana, was conducting some library research on possible mining areas. He chanced across a report by Jean Jacques Dozy, published in 1939 by the University of Leiden, but subsequently forgotten in the upheavals of World War II. Although the report stated that it would be hard to imagine a more difficult place to find an ore deposit, Wilson was thrilled.

"My reaction was immediate," Wilson said. "I was so excited I could feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck."

Wilson was determined to view the marvel himself and to take enough samples to determine if mining operations would be justified. In 1936 it had taken Dozy 57 days to reach Ertsberg after a parachute drop.

Taking advantage of post-World War II U.S. military organization and financing from Freeport, Wilson sent in an advance party and hopped on a chartered plane from Biak. He landed on the south coast of what was then Dutch New Guinea. The landing strip was a former Japanese airfield used for bombing raids on Darwin, Australia.

Wilson's party canoed as far upstream as possible, then hiked in with mountain West Papuans who, paid in axes and machetes, served as porters. The porters, the mining engineer writes, ate "anything that walks, creeps or crawls," including humans, which they called "long pigs" and found much juicier than pork.

A skilled West Papuan miner wields a jackhammer.

It took Wilson 17 days to reach Ertsberg, scaling a sheer cliff face 600 meters high where the tramway now smoothly ferries passengers and ore. The trek was worth it—as he chipped through the stone's oxidized layer he saw the gleaming golden color of chal-copyrite, a sulfide of iron and copper. Spending several days at the Ertsberg collecting samples, Wilson also saw malachite stains on a distant cliff, part of what is now called Gunung Bijih Timur ("Ore Mountain East").

Wilson's initial estimates, relayed excitedly by radio, proved quite accurate: 13 million tons of high grade ore lay above ground and 14 million tons more below. But, as he describes, this was "perhaps the most remote, primitive and inhospitable area in the world." The copper was there all right; the problem was getting it out.

Wilson even had problems getting out himself. Not only was he apprehensive of his cannibal porters, but he wore out his seventh and last pair of boots before reaching the canoes. But he made it, bringing back several hundred pounds of samples, which confirmed his opinion of their high copper content.

Freeport needed more samples before investing the millions of dollars required to build the mine, however. One problem—insurmountable at the time—was transporting the huge diamond drills needed to take deep samples. Even disassembled, the parts were too heavy for choppers in the early 1960s, which could then lift only one passenger and 113 kilos to a height of no more than 3,600 meters.

Technology and politics

Clouds of political instability combined with technical problems to block the project, as President Sukarno began a military campaign to wrest West Papua from the Dutch. The project was put on the back burner in the hopes that eventually the situation would change.

After Suharto took over the reins of government, a 1967 Foreign Investment Law once again encouraged investment in Indonesia. Freeport hired Ali Budiarjo as a consultant and things began to look up. Budiaijo was a Dutch-educated Indonesian, a patriot who opposed colonialism, but most importantly, a Javanese well-connected to the Jakarta scene.

Wilson and a legal advisor were among the first foreign businessmen to be welcomed back to the country. When they arrived at the Hotel Indonesia, there were only 15 guests attended by 1,800 employees. Freeport's contract with the government was the first to be signed under the new investment law.

In 1967, the last phase of testing was carried out. Helicopter technology had by then advanced such that there were craft available that could lift half a ton to the required altitude—enough to ferry in the diamond drills needed for core samples. The deep cores confirmed Wilson's estimates.

Tembagapura, or "Copper City," nestles in a 1,850-meter-high valley.

Financing was the next problem. Wilson had to convince Freeport's board of directors, understandably nervous after Fidel Castro's nationalization of their operation in Cuba, that Indonesia was a safe place to invest. A consortium of Japanese and German lenders finally backed Freeport and the project began.

Bechtel was chosen as the prime contractor, but even these famous can-do engineers were nearly overwhelmed by technical problems at Tembagapura. Bechtel stated categorically that the mine was the most formidable construction feat they had ever undertaken.

Building the mine

Men and supplies were ferried in from Australia in a PBY seaplane (Howard Hughes had earlier converted it to fish salmon in Alaska but later lost interest) and a seaport was hacked out of the mangrove swamps with chainsaws at Amamapare, at the mouth of the Timika River. Men sank up to their waists in mud sawing through a 15-acre morass of mangrove roots, praying all the time that the racket would keep the crocodiles at bay.

Temporary landing pads for the helicopters were carved out by lowering chain-saw-wielding men on lines from the hovering craft. The men, dangling in the air, cut the tops off the trees to get through the thick canopy and, once on the ground, chopped up enough trunks to make a landing platform. Helicopters ferried men and supplies everywhere. Six choppers were on the job by August 1971, shifting 1,604 tons of supplies inland in that month alone.

The 92-kilometer road from the Tipuka River to the mill site was the toughest challenge. Eighty kilometers from the port, the least abrupt incline rose at a 70 degree angle. The mountain was not only steep, but razorbacked—a two-foot wide ridge, with sheer drops on either side. At first, tiny D4 bulldozers, slightly bigger than a lawn-mower, were flown in to carefully shave off the top of the ridge and make room for the slightly larger D6s, which in turn cleared space for the D7s, followed by the D8s. By the time the monstrous, 25-ton D12s were done, 12 million tons of earth had been moved, altering the angle of the slope from 70 to 27 degrees—the maximum that could be negotiated by fully-loaded trucks. Not even the steepest streets of San Francisco have such a grade.

Separated from loved ones in isolated Tembagapura, mine workers entertain themselves with spirited soccer games.

A hundred Korean coal miners were flown in to dig a 1,105 meter tunnel through Mt. Hannekam for the first section of the road, at 2,600 meters. From there, the road dropped to 1,850 meters at the site of Tembagapura, then shot up through another tunnel to the future mill site, located at 2,900 meters, 10 kilometers from Copper City.

To move ore from the mine to the mill, an 800-meter tramway was constructed through the rain and fast-moving clouds of the highlands (there are now two). Each of the cars, humming along on dual cables, carries 11-17 tons of partially crushed mineral to the bottom, dumps its load, and then returns to the top in a never-ending procession.

Construction of the unsupported, single-span tramway began when a helicopter towed a 3,000-meter-long nylon rope from the valley to the mine site. Once this was strung, it was used to pull up progressively stronger rope and finally, the heavy cables. But once in place, heavy oscillation derailed the ore cars, flipping them against the rock wall and down into the valley.

An expert mathematician was brought in from Switzerland to solve the problem. He calculated the resonances of all the parts, and made some small but crucial adjustments to the system. "A tramway is like a violin," the mathematician said. "It has to be tuned."

Pipeline to the sea

At the mill, the ore is crushed to a fine powder, and the valuable mineral is separated from the base rock. A concentrated slurry is produced, then pumped into 112-kilometer pipelines that follow the contours of the land to the port of Amamapare on the coast There the slurry is dried, and loaded on ore ships.

The pipeline gave engineers headaches at first. It repeatedly ruptured until a pump speed of just over 3 miles per hour, with a fairly wet slurry (64 to 67 percent water), was settled on as ideal.

There are no roads out of Amamapare. All travel is by boat, across the ocean or up the river. Some 18 kilometers upriver, the road begins, and here barges unload their cargo. Timika, where a modern airport receives Garuda jets, is 22 kilometers from where the barges unload. The road then runs flat and straight for 40 kilometers to the base of the mountains, past the ricefields of Javanese transmigrants. From the base of the mountain to the 2,600 meter ridge is a quick, switch-back climb. Once at the top, the road follows the ridge before heading through a tunnel to Tembagapura—92 kilometers of incredible engineering.

On Christmas Day 1971, the first convoy of trucks arrived at Tembagapura. A year later, the first shipment of copper concentrate was already on its way to Japan. In the meantime, about $200 million had been spent.

In March 1973, President Suharto gave Tembagapura its name and officially opened the operation. At the same time he ordained that the name of the province would henceforth be Irian Jaya ("Victorious Irian") instead of Irian Barat ("West Irian"), a decision which obliged the Freeport officials to send the dedication plaque back to the United States for re-engraving.

Although the initial investment in building the mine was recovered in just three years, low world copper prices kept profits to a minimum until 1979. From the start of operations in 1973 until the end of 1980, some 521,000 tons of copper concentrate were shipped out, containing 6 million ounces of silver and 463,000 ounces of gold, and resulting in $772 million in gross sales.

Community relations problems

The West Papuans living near the mine site were at first simply astonished by all the activity, then began to resent the huge disparity of wealth that existed between themselves and the Freeport workers. At times, groups have claimed ownership of the mine, saying that their land and minerals have been unfairly expropriated.

At one time, the West Papuans—who considered the mountain sacred—put up saleps, hex sticks in the shape of crude half-meter-high wooden crosses, all around Copper Mountain. Resentment still surfaces today.

In the first years of the mine's operation, a cargo cult grew up in the area. One man proclaimed that he would be able to open the warehouse inside the mountain where the whites and western Indonesians obtain their wonderful possessions, with only a special rodent's tooth. The tooth didn't work, but this longing for material goods continued to brew.

Separatist rebels—members of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM, which had been fighting against Indonesian rule since the 1960s—recruited some West Papuans near Tembagapura, including a few of the company workers. The conflict came to a head in the summer of 1977, and the slurry pipeline was cut in several places, power lines were ruptured, an explosives magazine was burned and several trucks returned with arrows in their radiators.

Most of the problems the company faces today have to do with displacement, and a growing dependency on the mine. In its setting, the wealth of the Freeport operations is incredible, and even the garbage produced by Tembagapura is very attractive to the people of the surrounding mountains.

Shanty towns sprang up just outside the town border, housing at one time some 1,000 people. The squatters lived off Tembagapura's garbage, stole whenever possible and were a constant sore point with Freeport as well as the government, which tried to convince them to return home or settle in the transmigration site at Timika, 70 kilometers away in the hot lowlands. (Recently, a sudden flood wiped out the shantytowns, and the people were relocated.)

Freeport has regularly sponsored local development projects, but in the past has had little success. Often, the problem has been that the company rushes in with manpower and largess—for example, building a village with company carpenters and wood—and the villages are left with a project that is unsuitable, and for which they have no sense of ownership. New programs are attempting to work more closely with each community, allowing the people to build a political consensus for the type of development they would like to see. This process results in fewer of the kind of flashy projects that look good in a corporate report, but the results are more lasting and valuable.