INVESTMENT OF S/ 3,000 MILLION IS REQUIRED TO REMEDY ALL MINING ENVIRONMENTAL LIABILITIES IN PERU

Currently, there are 6,128 Mining Environmental Liabilities, according to the Inventory of the Ministry of Energy and Mines as of 2023

Lima, April 18, 2024. Dante Aguilar, manager of Private Investment in Mining Assets – AMSAC, estimated that our country requires an approximate investment of S/ 3,000 million to remedy all its Mining Environmental Liabilities, which amount to a total of 6,128, according to the Inventory of the Ministry of Energy and Mines (Minem) for 2023.

“Doing a simple arithmetic operation, with the corresponding variations, more or less we still require S/ 3,000 million to clean up the entire country of environmental liabilities,” he indicated at the Mining Meeting titled “Challenges and Opportunities around environmental liabilities,” organized by the Institute of Mining Engineers of Peru.

This calculation arises from the investment recorded since the beginning of the work of Activos Mineros, a state environmental remediation company, in 2007, until 2023, a period in which close to S/ 1,000 million has been invested.

“Unlike our neighbors, Peru has already invested almost S/ 1,000 million in the entire existence of Mining Assets and the remediation that it has been developing (…) More than S/ 939 million has been invested in remediation from 2007 to 2023, corresponding to Environmental Trust projects and High Risk Liabilities,” Aguilar said.

“There must be an investment of S / 3,000 million or more in this remediation sector in the coming years,” he added.

Where do these environmental liabilities arise from?

On the other hand, Aguilar also referred to the origin of these environmental liabilities and indicated that they are remnants of all the ancestral mining activity in our country and also, of course, they are remnants of illegal mining.

“This (mining) activity was carried out without any kind of care for many decades, it has practically been carried out in this way until the 1990s, when some drafts of environmental conservation standards and an entire privatization process began, because before In 1990, mining activity was carried out by the State,” he explained.

He also stated that, currently, this industry operates with high standards of socio-environmental sustainability and is a necessary activity, not only because of the economic contribution it generates to the country, but also because it contributes critical minerals for the energy transition, which aims to mitigate global warming. .

“The truth is that beyond GDP and economic indicators, Peru is one of the major suppliers of raw materials that the world requires for the energy transition, such as copper,” he stressed.