By Kirsty Needham
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape on Monday urged mining investors to get on with developing their resources, pushing for more downstream processing in the country and more local employment.
“You must show some progress, I don’t want warehousing of licenses,” Marape told a conference in Sydney, in comments directed at foreign investors.
The biggest undeveloped mining resource in the Pacific nation is the Wafi-Golpu copper-gold project, owned by Australia’s Newcrest Mining and South Africa’s Harmony Gold Mining.
The project has long been stuck on the drawing board, partly due to a battle with the government over how big a share of the project’s gold output would go to the PNG government.
“We understand you are not a charity but please take my people with you,” he told the mining and petroleum conference.
Marape has been pressing for PNG to receive a bigger share of the benefits from mining and energy projects since he first became prime minister in 2019, and so far has succeeded in renegotiating deals with energy giants ExxonMobil Corp and TotalEnergies on their gas projects.
He highlighted the country’s proximity to resource-hungry Asian nations as an advantage for its mining and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The biggest single foreign investment in the country is the PNG LNG project, run by Exxon.
“Last year when I visited China I was able to sell 3 million metric tonnes of gas. Papua New Guinea is using its bilateral network and multilateral networks to trade and can find markets,” Marape said.
The next major gas development awaiting a final investment decision is TotalEnergies’ Papua LNG project. The company has said it aims to decide whether to go ahead with the project around the end of 2023.
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by Diane Craft and Kenneth Maxwell)
