Caterpillar’s autonomous 794 AC haul truck fleet at Anglo American’s Quellaveco copper mine in Moquegua, Peru has passed 500 Mt of material moved, with Ferreyros supporting the deployment as Caterpillar’s local representative. The fully autonomous trucks operate on steep, high-altitude pit ramps typical of Andean copper operations, integrating with digital fleet management and high-precision guidance systems. The milestone signals growing confidence in large-scale autonomous haulage for greenfield copper projects, with implications for haul road design, traffic management rules, and maintenance planning.

Anglo American, via its 50.1%-owned Anglo American Sur SA, and Codelco have finalised a definitive agreement to run a joint mine plan for the adjacent Los Bronces and Andina copper operations in central Chile, after securing all competition and regulatory approvals. The integrated planning covers two large-scale open pits sharing the same Andean district, enabling coordinated sequencing of ore bodies, waste dumps and tailings storage across property boundaries. For mine planners and geotechnical teams, this opens scope for shared slope design, haul road rationalisation and potentially consolidated infrastructure for high-altitude water and power supply.

NexMetals Mining has lifted the Selkirk copper-nickel-PGE project in Botswana to about 1.1 billion lb of indicated copper equivalent, with 78.2 million tonnes at 0.66% CuEq after extensive re-assaying and twin drilling converted a large portion of the inferred resource. A further 15.1 million inferred tonnes at 0.60% CuEq (200 million lb CuEq) remain, with the 63% increase in metal inventory versus 2024 driven mainly by improved metallurgical recoveries and adding cobalt, silver and gold as payable metals. Selkirk now sits alongside the nearby Selebi project (75 km away) as a core critical-metals asset on a 14.6 sq. km mining licence.