Global miner BHP has eyes on making Peru the main protagonist of its South American exploration strategy and is set to double down on its investment in the world’s second-largest copper nation.

Speaking at the PERUMIN conference taking place in Arequipa this week, Carlos Ávila, president of non-operated assets for BHP Minerals Americas, indicated that the company will make an investment of $12 million to redouble its efforts in Peru.

This investment, according to Ávila, will be used to identity future deposits that will supply the growing demand for copper in the world. BHP currently has about a dozen exploration projects underway in six regions of the country, with varying degrees of progress.

The most promising of those is Jatun Orcco, in Huancavelica, which recently advanced to the drilling phase. This became the first BHP project to reach this stage in five years, Ávila noted. In addition, he specified that the company is ready to begin baseline work on various projects in the Apurímac region, where it already has the approval from local communities for the start of work.

However, Ávila maintained that “Peru’s mining potential is enormous, but the country’s privileged conditions are not a guarantee of success and it must be recognized that what worked in the past is not a recipe for the future.”

In that sense, he told those attending the Challenges and Opportunities in the Andean Region conference that the conditions to successfully develop a safe and sustainable mining business include legal certainty and a fast and efficient permitting process.

Accompanying the exploration projects, Ávila pointed out that more than a million dollars have been invested in social initiatives in Peru that directly benefit the surrounding communities, benefiting more than 2,600 people in Huacavelica and Arequipa. One of the initiatives is Enseña Perú, which seeks to provide a better education for children in these two regions.

On the topic of inclusion, he stated that BHP has set a global goal of achieving a gender balance in its operations. By the end of 2023, about 36% of the workforce will be made up of women, Ávila estimated.