Anglo American and Codelco Finalise Agreement to Jointly Develop Adjacent Chile Copper Mines

Anglo American has finalised an agreement with Codelco, the world's largest copper producer by output, to jointly develop adjacent copper mining concessions in Chile. The agreement is structured to deliver an estimated 2.7 million tonnes of additional copper production by optimising how the companies' neighbouring assets are operated together, avoiding the cost and timeline of constructing a new mine.

The logic behind the joint arrangement is geographic and operational: Anglo American and Codelco hold adjacent copper concessions in Chile whose boundaries were drawn by historical accident. Mining across those boundaries separately creates duplicated infrastructure, inefficient haulage routes, and suboptimal ore blending. Operating them jointly allows a single integrated pit design, shared processing facilities, and coordinated extraction sequencing that unlocks resource that neither company could access efficiently on its own.

For Anglo American, the agreement represents a meaningful addition to its copper production pipeline at a time when the group has been strategically repositioning itself as a copper-focused miner. Anglo American has shed its South African platinum assets, its Steelmaking Coal business, and other non-copper operations to concentrate capital and management attention on what it regards as the most attractive long-term metals market given the structural demand from electrification and energy transition applications.

Codelco brings operational expertise in Chilean copper mining at scale, government backing as a state entity, and existing relationships with the Chilean regulatory environment that are valuable in complex mine permitting scenarios.

What to Watch

The key milestones are: regulatory approvals from Chilean authorities for the joint operational structure, the timeline and capital expenditure plan for implementing the integrated mine design, and how the production uplift flows through Anglo American's reported attributable copper output in future annual results.