METALS and mining group Billiton expects to start a feasibility study in late March on how to develop its Spence copper project in Chile. Work on the study will probably begin ”sometime at the end of March and will be a year’s duration,” Billiton representative Marc Gonsalves said. Expected production and investment figures are still vague because the feasibility study needs to be finished before they can be fine-tuned, but an official earlier targeted annual output at between 250_000 and 300_000 tonnes of copper. Depending on how it is developed, the project may require an investment of between $600m and $700m the official said. The feasibility study, previously slated to finish in 2000, will decide how to process the oxides and sulfides in the deposit. – Reuters