Development chief departs Anglo’s Woodsmith project

The chief development officer of the North Yorkshire fertiliser mine now owned by Anglo American has stepped down and is set to leave the company next month.

The departure of Simon Carter, who has led the Woodsmith project since 2016, comes as Anglo prepares to announce the final budget and schedule for the mine near Whitby to investors later this year.

Anglo took control of Woodsmith in 2019 when it bought the project’s developer Sirius Minerals in a £405m deal, saving the company from collapse.

Woodsmith is a complex project involving the sinking of two 1.5km shafts to access a deposit of polyhalite — a mineral that can be used as fertiliser but is not yet commercially proven — and linking it to a 37km underground tunnel that will take the material to a port on Teesside.

The mine has already created hundreds of well-paid jobs in one of the poorest parts of the UK and given a much-needed boost to the local economy.

More than $1bn has already been invested in the project, with a further $3.3bn needed to reach production of 10m tonnes a year, according to the plans and models developed by Sirius.

Carter’s exit was announced last month by Chris Fraser, the former chief executive of Sirius who now runs Anglo’s fledging crop nutrient business.

In a note to staff, Fraser said the start of deep shaft sinking at the site on the North York Moors National Park marked a “natural opportunity for a change in leadership and for Simon after five years at the helm”.

“We continue to make great progress throughout the Woodsmith Project, and the Project Team is working hard to deliver an updated and more detailed project plan building on the standards and approach that Anglo American requires for its operations,” Fraser said in the memo.

Carter is being replaced by Chris Lockett, a former Anglo employee who was also project director of Oyu Tolgoi, Rio Tinto’s troubled $6.75bn underground copper project in the Gobi Desert.

Sirius, a favourite of UK retail investors, was forced to seek a buyer in 2019 after struggling to raise billions of dollars it needed to complete the ambitious project.

Big investors in the City of London never warmed to the scheme, in part because of the difficulty of building a global market for polyhalite and the risk of delays and cost overruns.

The Financial Times has spoken to a number of people who have worked on the project who said that the shaft-sinking timelines developed by Sirius would be difficult to achieve.

They also said that Anglo had ended the contract of its shaft-sinking contractor DMC Mining Services in July, transferring most of the staff to its payroll.

Speaking after annual results in February, Mark Cutifani, Anglo chief executive, said progress at Woodsmith had been “solid”, with the Teesside tunnel “driven” to almost 13km.

He also said that, while Anglo had not given up on the Sirius schedule of achieving first production by 2024, the company had assumed in its financial models that it would happen “a little later”.

“We’re not sitting back and heading for a different target. We are trying to get where they are going,” he said. “If we could get to 2024 that would be a great outcome but there is some risk to that and it is around the shaft timing.”

Anglo declined to comment.