PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Mining giant BHP is keeping an eye on the cost of iron-ore production as competition emerges from West Africa.

Iron-ore prices declined in the first half of 2022 as China’s steel production curbs took hold, while seaborne supply improved.

BHP noted in its half-year results that prices have since stabilised and recovered, albeit not to the previous highs.

In the medium term, China’s demand for iron-ore is expected to be lower than it is currently, as crude steel production plateaus and the scrap-to-steel ratio rises. In the long term, prices are expected to be determined by high-cost production, on a value-in-use adjusted basis, from Australia or Brazil.

“That assessment is robust to the prospective entry of new supply from West Africa, the likelihood of which has increased. This implies that it will be even more important to create competitive advantage and to grow value through driving exceptional operational performance,” BHP VP for market analysis and economics Dr Huw McKay says.

BHP told shareholders that it was "imperative that we continue to compete on both quality and operational effectiveness".

Unit costs at BHP’s Western Australian iron-ore operations are below guidance at the half-year and are tracking towards the lower end of the guidance range on a full-year basis. The division's unit costs, on a C1 basis excluding third party royalties, were 18% higher than the prior period at $14.74/t driven by higher diesel prices and costs associated with the South Flank ramp-up.

BHP in September last year received regulatory approval to increase capacity at its Port Hedland operations up to 330-million tonnes a year, subject to the outcomes of standard appeals processes, but said on Tuesday that its near-term focus remains on sustainable achievement of 290-million tonnes of iron-ore, with plans to creep beyond this through productivity improvements in the medium term.

Meanwhile, McKay is predicting that iron-ore supply is expected to remain in surplus during the remainder of calendar 2022.

Meanwhile, the demand-supply balance for both copper and nickel will remain tight over the next 12 months, and McKay noted that there was no clear directional bias for oil prices from current elevated levels, while liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices are more likely to move lower than to sustain all-time highs.

Metallurgical coal prices have also achieved all-time records on multi-regional, multi-causal supply disruptions, and the degree to which these ease, and by when, is the key swing factor for the coming year, McKay said.

Potash seems poised at the crest of its stunning bull wave, driven by strikingly positive downstream fundamentals at a time of both constrained and uncertain supply, he added.

“There is obviously still some residual uncertainty as to how vaccine deployment and the policy and behavioural response to the newer, highly transmissible strain of Covid-19 will interact over the coming quarters. There is also a higher level of macro complexity to deal with than in the recent past, as the world’s two major systemic growth engines, the US and China, adopt diametrically opposite counter-cyclical policy stances.

“So while the ‘uncertainty discount’ in the risk appetite of households and businesses we have noted in previous communications is definitely fading, it is doing so in uneven fashion across the world, and new vectors of uncertainty have arisen, such as the situation in Ukraine.

“Looking beyond the immediate picture to the medium term, we continue to see the need for additional supply, both new and replacement, to be induced across many of the sectors in which we operate. 

“After a multi-year period of adjustment in which demand rebalances and supply recalibrates to the unique circumstances created by the Covid-19 shock, we anticipate that higher-cost production will be required to enter the supply stack in our preferred growth commodities as the decade proceeds,” McKay said.

“The projected medium-to-longer term steepening of some industry cost curves that we monitor, which may be amplified if carbon pricing becomes more influential in both demand and supply centres, can reasonably be expected to reward disciplined and sustainable owner-operators with higher quality assets featuring embedded optionality.”