The company could not say exactly how many jobs would be lost.
A BHP spokeswoman on Monday told MiningNews.net that 90 roles would be made redundant, though there was opportunity for redeployment, either at Olympic Dam or in other parts of the company.
A further 90 roles which are not currently filled would be cut from the headcount.
And around 130 contractor roles will convert to BHP roles. The contractors affected can reapply for the BHP roles.
“Over the past few months, BHP Billiton Olympic Dam has been focussed on identifying opportunities to safely reduce costs in order to build a strong, viable business,” the BHP spokeswoman said.
“This has included an analysis of our labour needs. We will always talk to our employees first about any changes to workforce numbers.”
Olympic Dam employs around 4000 people.
The cuts come as the copper price fell to around six-year lows last week.
BHP famously shelved a $A20 billion open pit expansion of Olympic Dam in August 2012 but is focused on increasing capacity through debottlenecking, which could add a further 50,000 tonnes per annum of copper production from the 2018 financial year to around 235,000tpa.
Longer term, while the open pit still remains off the table, BHP is looking into a lower-cost, modular underground expansion with plans to increase ore-hoisting capacity to 21 million tonnes per annum from around 10.5Mtpa currently, with the stope mining method to remain unchanged.
The main change is on the surface, where BHP plans to build a heap leach plant to operate in parallel with the current concentrator and the company received federal approval in September to build a three-year demonstration plant.
The project has the potential to enable Olympic Dam to produce over 450,000 tonnes per annum of copper with uranium, gold and silver by-products by the mid-2020s.
The project will advance to prefeasibility stage this year.
The operation, Australia’s largest underground mine, produced around 82,200 tonnes of copper in the December 2014 half, nearly 69,000 ounces of gold, 497,000oz silver and 1942t uranium oxide.
