A mine shut for 37 years by civil war is about to reopen — with $160 billion in reserves

Bougainville's autonomous government authorized India's Lloyds Metals to begin feasibility studies to reopen the Panguna mine, closed since 1989. The conflict over the mine killed up to 20,000 people and still shapes how any reopening has to be negotiated.

Until 1989, Panguna was one of the world's largest copper mines and Papua New Guinea's main source of revenue. The operation, then controlled by Rio Tinto, was halted amid protests by local communities over environmental damage and over how the mine's revenue was split between the central government and Bougainville's population. The conflict escalated into a civil war lasting nearly a decade, leaving between 15,000 and 20,000 dead and leading Rio Tinto to abandon the asset entirely. Nearly four decades later, on August 7, Bougainville's autonomous government authorized India's Lloyds Metals & Energy — now the approved development partner of local state-owned firm Bougainville Minerals — to carry out a program of preparatory works and feasibility studies to plan the mine's redevelopment. Lloyds beat out competition from China's CMOC Group, one of the world's largest copper miners, to win that position.

Panguna is a rare case study on what actually needs to change for a mineral asset shut down by social conflict to become viable again — and the answer isn't mainly technical or geological. The copper and gold reserves were always there; what was missing for 37 years was a political and social arrangement that Bougainville's communities would accept as legitimate. August's authorization covers only preparatory work and feasibility studies, not construction or production — and the autonomous government itself made a point of publicly stating that the redevelopment will move one step at a time, a sign that the memory of the conflict still weighs more than any financial appeal. The choice of Lloyds is also revealing: an Indian iron ore producer, little known outside its home market, beat one of China's largest copper miners in a process where reputation, track record with community relations and willingness to negotiate on Bougainville's terms seem to have mattered more than scale or available capital. For any company evaluating assets with a history of social conflict — and the industry has several — the case suggests that reputation and community-relations due diligence needs to come before, not after, the assessment of reserves.

Copper is the central metal of electrification and the energy transition, and the global supply of new mines has historically been slow to keep up with projected demand. Reactivating a known deposit, with $160 billion in mapped reserves, has a much larger potential impact on future copper supply than most greenfield projects currently in development. At the same time, Panguna carries the symbolic weight of being the industry's most-cited example of how failures of social license can shut down a mine for generations — which makes every step of this reopening a precedent watched closely by other operations with histories of conflict with local communities.