John Tumazos: If I could follow with one more. A few years ago, Freeport bought a drinking water system and a sewage system for Arequipa, the third largest city as you were tripling the El Abra mill and mine — excuse me, the Cerro Verde mill and mine. And I think you might have some rail — short-line rails, so that you don’t have as many trucks on the road. Could you just confirm that your tons per day are 350,000 to 400,000 tons a day and no mishaps at Cerro Verde? I think, there’s a lot of confusion in the press about conditions…
Kathleen Quirk: Yes. So, in the last several days, we’ve been operating — we’ve been operating at around that 350,000 level. Prior to that, we were closer to 400,000. We’ve really been operating at 10%, 15% lower just to deal with supplies. And so, we’re watching that every day. And I’ll let Richard comment on the community situation. But in terms of operations, we’re continuing to operate, but we have limited our mill throughput just to deal with the limitations and the concerns about key supplies.
Richard Adkerson: Yes. And I’m glad you asked the question because I wanted to elaborate on what I said about Peru in my opening comments. I think all of you know that the Cerro Verde milling complex is the largest in the industry, 400,000-plus per day capacity. The tailings dam will be one of the largest earthen dams ever constructed in the history of mankind, if not the largest. And what John is referring to is a number of years ago, we did as a community project invested in a freshwater system for Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru. And then, as we were developing the expansion of the concentrator and tailings dam, we shifted away from building a new dam on the river that runs just outside of the sea of Arequipa. We come in and we built a wastewater collection and treatment system.
And with doing that, we got water for our concentrator and we markedly improved the ecology of the river, and that has been very positively received by downstream farmers and community itself. And that’s really helped foster our positive relationship there. And our team there does overall good. Now, having said that, the situation in Peru is very complicated and nobody at this point can predict how it’s going to unfold. The motions are very high. The government is reluctant to use extreme steps to deal with roadblocks and disruptions and this thing in the day-to-day evolution. And so we are faced with the problems that caused us to cut back on our production rates to conserve line and other inputs so that we could continue to operate. We have the ability to house workers on a temporary basis on site.
Most of our workers live in the region of the city of Arequipa, and sometimes those roads have been blocked. So, we’re prepared for it. Our team does a great job in managing things like this over time like COVID and — but I just wanted to make the point that these concerns that people are raising are directed towards the issues with the government and not directed against us at Cerro Verde and our operations. And so far, we’ve been able to continue to operate.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Michael Dudas with Vertical Research. Please go ahead.
Michael Dudas: I was intrigued by your comment about labor and availability and such. I guess, you’re talking a bit more like in the U.S. But — how much is that situation limiting — limited your volume plans for 2023 is probably a small percentage. But is it more secular pressure of getting the qualified productive miners and operators for all your mines? Is that also going to be a limiting factor on how the industry reacts to try to move forward with the market signaling in the future, they’re going to need more supply?
Kathleen Quirk: Yes. Well, during COVID, we did have some impacts on our mining rates, and also suspended some milling operations at Morenci. And I’m speaking about the U.S. right now. And we started ramping back up in the U.S. during 2021, and that continued into 2022. And we have a situation where we currently have about something on the order of 1,300 job openings. And we’ve got typically 10,000 to 12,000 employees in the U.S. And so — and we’ve seen a lot of turnover as well. And it’s just been a very competitive marketplace for labor, as you’ve read about it, in the U.S. And we don’t have that situation in Indonesia or in South America, but we do have competition in the U.S. with other sectors, and that’s continued into 2023 and what’s caused us to change our outlook somewhat.
We could have in 2022, produced more, if we were fully staffed. And I believe that is the case again this year. And that’s why we’re making some progress on hires and we are conducting training and some of these workers that we’re hiring now are new to the industry, and so we do have to go through training, and the experience level is not what it was five years ago. So, we’re going through that process. I think it does have some implications to — the ability to develop a mine in the U.S. is just the labor force. But we’ll see what happens. You’re starting to see some changes in payrolls and that sort of thing, and we’ll see how this unfolds. But it is a factor in our U.S. mining output.
Richard Adkerson: Yes. So, it’s broader than mining. I mean, when I talk with people to business council, business around the table, it’s a common theme you hear across many industries. And when all the COVID relief funds went out, that was a factor. I mean, face it, our work is hard work. And it’s harder to drive a big haul truck than it is to drive an Amazon or UPS or FedEx truck. So, we compete with those. We pay our people strong living wages. We’re giving people substantial increases this year. We invest in recreational facilities, try to deal with housing. It’s an issue in Colorado with our molybdenum mines. You can imagine what it’s like there. So, it’s a big issue for us. And as a result, our mine rates start meeting what we would like for them to meet, and that affects not only current but future production, and it’s a strategic challenge for us.
But, it’s not just us and it’s not just the mining industry, but the mining industry because the nature of the work presents special problems.
