Richard Adkerson
Analyst · Cowen and Company
Thanks, Jim Bob. On the financial highlights page on Page 8, I'm not going to repeat what Kathleen reviewed with you at the start of the call, but I wanted to just point out the impact of the suspension of operations of PT-FI. You see that our volumes of 950 million pounds of copper, they were roughly -- that reflected the impact of having 125 million pounds of less production.
With gold of 173, we had 125 million ounces less production of gold. So that is really what drove the shortfall in our performance, together with this factor that I mentioned that many of our costs at PT-FI are fixed. Now that works for us in a very positive way as volumes increase because we don't have increased costs that's commensurate with our prices. But it also had an effect this quarter of having our unit costs higher because of the fixed nature of our cost.
This is further shown on Page 9. You can see in North America, in South America, in Africa, where we have our unit cost at the top of the page and our volumes at the bottom of the page, that those operations really performed strongly, both in terms of having a production achievement of our targets, our goals and control of our cost in today's environment. The numbers speak for themselves. The impact in Indonesia saw our unit costs rise significantly as a result of the lower volumes and the fixed nature of our cost.
The Oil & Gas operations, and Jim will talk more to this in a few minutes, are presented in summary on Page 10. This only reflects 1 month of operations. We'll account for the Oil & Gas acquisitions prospectively going forward. It was only from June in this particular quarter. But I want to point out just how strong the volume -- the margins are in this business, looking at the unit revenue cost and the operation margin per BOE.
Across the board, this again is a business that has very high operating margins, and that gives us a chance to focus on profitable growth and disciplined growth and achieve value creation for our company through these assets.
Copper markets, some bullet points on Page 11. This was a very volatile quarter. It started out fairly strong, had a dip in price of significance early in the quarter. When some Chinese economic concerns came back, it bounced back. And then in June, when the U.S. bid talked about moderating their open market purchases of bonds and the purchasing number came out in China and growth was just marginally less, the price dropped off. These are macroeconomic events. There really hasn't been supported by fundamentals in the marketplace, which really haven't changed that much. China continues to remain the important demand driver in the business, consuming almost 40% of the world's copper and accounting for the growth in demand.
And within China, fundamental copper demand is really strong. It's growing at 8% to 10% a year. The downstream business is strong, scrap is short, premiums are up. I'll just refer you to the analysts that follow the business, the -- that follow the business and you can substantiate that. But the prices are what they are because of markets. Sentiment in Europe remains weak.
Our business in the U.S., supported by automobiles and a stronger construction, is relatively strong and longer-range supply challenges persist. But be that as it may, the copper price is what it is; we don't run our business on any near-term expectations of price. We're very confident about the long-term fundamentals of this marketplace. And what you'll see is we're responding to the lower prices and to the risk of that persist -- continuing in the future. And we're taking that with actions to reduce costs. We began that during the quarter in earnest.
On Page 12, within our mining business, we undertook a project at looking at all of our capital spending projects and making decisions to defer costs or eliminate costs when we could do that without really disrupting our -- either our near-term at this point or our long-term growth opportunity. And we've had success with that. It's a list of items that just illustrates the breadth of scope that our team has done, led by Red and Mark and Dave Thornton and our whole team, to find items of where we could achieve this goal of conserving cash.
And we aren't finished, but as we report today with where we are, we have capital reductions for the next 2 years of $1.4 billion, and that includes $400 million in the Oil & Gas business, which is going through a similar process of looking at their capital spending. And then looking at costs beyond capital, and we end up with a total of $1.9 million of deferrals -- $1 billion of deferrals over the next 2 years.
Now that's one element and it's continuing. The other element is to look at our asset base and look for ways again of, as Jim Bob said, achieving this target of reaching our right balance sheet goals for debt in light of lower commodity prices and finding ways of potentially accelerating in achieving that goal from beyond the target of 2016.
We've initiated plans to sell conventional oil and gas production on the shelf of the Gulf of Mexico, and that's a process that's started. We have a broad set of other assets that gives us many alternatives in terms of potential property sale or innovative structures to come up with ways of achieving this goal, and it is a commitment. It is a commitment and we're committed to do it, and we're committed to doing it in whatever environment we have to deal with.
At the same time that we're going through this process, we're continuing to date with our brownfield development projects in the mining business. We had 3 major projects that were growth projects that we're targeting to add about 1 billion pounds of copper sales a year, which is a significant amount of volumes.
We've completed the Tenke Fungurume Phase 2 project on time, on budget. The Morenci mill project is in progress. We've incurred about $600 million to date of our revised estimate of $1.6 billion to our interest, we have an 85% interest at Morenci. That's going very well, very high rate of return project and one that has a very quick payback because of significant volumes that come out of that project as we add on to the existing substantial operations at Morenci.
At Cerro Verde, we commenced construction earlier this year. The plan is to complete that in 2016. We've incurred about $800 million of the $4.4 billion of good support from the government, the local community.
And so the numbers that you see to date involve continuations of those projects. We have options of changing those decisions if market conditions warrant, but we can achieve this targeted debt reduction goal and do these projects at the same time.
We're also continuing the underground development at PT-FI, which is necessary for us to be able to go forward with this very valuable operation beyond the exploration of mining and the open pit, which is -- continues to be expected by roughly the end of 2016.
We did have this horrific accident that we talked about earlier on May 14, where we had a tunnel collapse in a training facility, and we had fatalities and injuries. This wasn't really a mining accident, it was apart from our mining operations. It was an incredibly horrific convergence of events that came together because of the geology of the rock and the influence of water and air on our ground support facilities, and unfortunately just happened just as we were having this training meeting. And then it was terrible, and all of our organization has responded in a caring and professional way about it.
But we also undertook internally a special safety review of all of our operations, focusing on underground operations where people gather. We worked with people with the energy and mines ministry in Indonesia and an independent team they formed. And at the conclusion of that process, we were able to resume operations on June 24 in the open pit, in the mill. And on July 9 in the underground, we are now ramping up the underground operations. You can't just start those immediately at full-scale production, and that ramping up is progressing.
In the quarter, we lost roughly 125 million pounds of copper and 125,000 ounces of gold. The full year impact will be greater than that. We estimate 230 million pounds of copper and 250,000 ounces of gold. That resource is still there. I mean, it's not going anywhere. We'll produce it in the future. But the impact for the year reflects a couple of factors: One is the time it takes to ramp up underground to get back to full production levels; plus, as you'll recall in the first quarter, we talked about how we were going to assess high-grade ore at the end of the year under our mine plans. Now some of that higher-grade ore will be pushed out into future years.
We try -- we presented this slide, which we have shown for 2012 earlier on Page 16 to show just what the impact was. We show the -- we're showing the average of copper and gold production in prior years from 2002 to 2011.
… and average for -- what our mine plan shows for 2014 to 2016, which will -- at that point, we will transfer from being a combination open pit underground operation to a full underground operation. If you can just see the significance of the volume that we've had, the low volumes we've had in 2012 and 2013 and how that translates in the chart on the far right to our unit cost, which averaged for PT-FI $0.13 a pound for the 2007, 2011 period, would actually be projected at a net credit. Going forward, all of this will depend on the price of gold. This is a $1,300 an ounce gold. So that illustrates the impact on current operations for that.
Page 17 shows part of our cost-saving efforts. We've refocused our mining exploration expenditures, reducing about $55 million of cost. And the bulk of our spending is on our brownfield expansion of our orebodies. But we do have some greenfield spending, and that course is a greenfield discovery, is the best thing that's happened to a natural resource company. But our brownfield projects are projects that add a lot of value for us.
I'm going to turn the mic over to Jim Flores, and Jim's going to be talking about our Oil & Gas activities.