S&C was recognized at the LatinFinance Project & Infrastructure Finance Awards for advising Minera Los Pelambres on its $2 billon project financing to expand its water infrastructure assets, which won ‘Infrastructure Financing of the Year: Latin America’ and ‘Infrastructure Financing of the Year: Southern Cone.’
“In a region where complex projects often struggle to find long-term capital, one deal has set a new benchmark,” wrote LatinFinance. “With a $2 billion financing package that married financial ingenuity with sustainability and scale, Antofagasta Minerals secured the future of its Los Pelambres mine while reshaping how natural resource companies access global capital.”
The expansion project involved the construction of a new desalination plant at the Los Pelambres mine site in Chile that will significantly increase the mine’s output and lengthen its life, ensuring an ongoing supply of copper, one of the most significant metals for the energy transition, to the global market. This transaction involved pioneering features, including the unbundling of Minera Los Pelambres’ water facilities from the rest of the business to provide infrastructure returns to investors without being subject to the commodity price risks inherent in a mining business.
As one of the first of this kind of infrastructure financing, the transaction has significance both for the infrastructure space generally and for natural resources companies in particular, providing a model for how previously untapped value can be unlocked to facilitate investment and further development.
The S&C team was led by Sergio Galvis and Benjamin Kent and included Andrew Brod.
S&C was also recognized for advising offtaker Centinela in the Charquican project’s SIAM I & II Seawater Pipeline Project, which won “Water Financing of the Year.”