Anglo American will report a $1.7bn impairment on the North Yorkshire fertiliser mine that it saved from the brink of collapse three years in the past, because the mining group introduced a better funds and prolonged schedule for one of many UK’s largest new mining tasks in a long time.

The FTSE 100 group recorded the writedown after estimating that it might spend $1bn a 12 months to convey the Woodsmith mine into manufacturing by 2027, making it each costlier and longer than anticipated when it acquired the mine.

Anglo rescued Woodsmith’s guardian Sirius Minerals in 2020 for £405mn. Sirius had been struggling to lift the billions of {dollars} that it estimated it wanted to construct the mine by 2024.

Woodsmith is a fancy undertaking involving the sinking of two 1.6km shafts to entry a deposit of polyhalite — a mineral that can be utilized as fertiliser however isn’t but commercially confirmed — and the development of a 37km underground tunnel to move materials to a port on Teesside.

Anglo’s chief monetary officer Stephen Pearce flagged final December a possible writedown on the carrying worth of Woodsmith because it deliberate to take longer to construct the mine at a better value with a view to course of greater volumes of fabric and prolong the mine life.

Design capability for the mine has been elevated to 13mn tonnes a 12 months, up from earlier plans for 10mn, which Anglo might ramp as much as hit within the early 2030s with a focused mine life of fifty years.

The finalisation of the undertaking plans got here as Anglo reported that full-year earnings earlier than curiosity, tax, depreciation and amortisation fell 30 per cent over the earlier 12 months to $14.5bn on revenues of $35.1bn, pushed by decrease manufacturing, in addition to inflation and better power prices.