Phelps Dodge Begins Mining at Long-Awaited Copper Mine in Safford, Arizona

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). The new Safford, Arizona Phelps Dodge Corporation (NYSE:PD) (Phoenix, Arizona) copper mine has begun the long-awaited mining process, but still doesn’t expect to see copper produced until sometime in 2008. Industrial Info has been tracking the Safford mining project since 1992. Various owners, permitting and market prices all added to many delays before groundbreaking for this $550 million project was held in June 2006. The 20,000-acre site is located north of the Gila River and will include two open pit mines known as the San Juan and Dos Pobres mines.

Phelps Dodge awarded Flour Canada, Limited as the engineering firm for the project and Aker Kvaerner Industrial Contractors as the general contractor.

Copper miners are taking advantage of good market conditions to increase copper capacity. See related October 6, 2006 news article - Major New Copper Mine Under Construction in Arizona. About 200 years ago, the United Kingdom was an important world source of copper with mines in Cornwall and Wales. These mines have now closed and today the biggest copper mines are in Chile and North America. Ore is extracted by traditional mining, open pit, leaching (as is the case in Safford), and underground. The copper is then recovered using physical and chemical techniques. Approximately 90% of all ore is mined by the open pit method. Ores near the surface can be quarried after removal of the surface layers.

Crushing is the first step in converting shot rock into usable products. Crushing comes down to the simple process of taking large rocks and reducing them to small pieces. While in some operations, all the crushing is accomplished in one step by a primary crusher. At the Safford copper mine, the process will be in three steps with a primary crusher that is followed by a secondary crusher and finally a tertiary crusher.

The crushers are essential components to copper production. The primary crusher breaks down ore boulders to pieces approximately the size of softballs. These move on to the secondary crusher, which reduces the stones to pieces about the size of a golf ball. Finally the tertiary crusher will crush these pieces into stones about the size of marbles. From there the crushed ore is ready to go to the stockpile, formed with a clay liner covered with plastic, and then the leaching begins. The stockpile of stones is expected to reach a size of 7,000 feet long by 4,000 feet wide and 600 feet high, but that isn’t expected to happen for about fifteen years. Using a drip irrigation system that continuously trickles a mild solution of water and sulfuric acid onto the pile of crushed ore, the copper is removed from the stones. The leach solution will drain to the bottom of the stockpile and transferred to the solution extraction plant. A process called “electrowinning” will make the extracted copper into large cathodes that are 99.999% pure copper. The anticipated production is 250 million tons a year of Cathode copper. Cathode copper gets its name from the way it is made. Cathode is produced in large electrolytic cells that refine the relatively impure blister copper. In the cells, cast copper anodes (the positively charged pole) approximately 3 square feet and weighing 400lbs are dissolved in a copper sulfate/sulfuric acid solution under the action of a an electric (DC) current. The copper is immediately re-deposited onto negatively charged cathodes by a simple electroplating process. Cathodes are removed from the cells when they have grown to about 300 pounds. Cathode copper contains at least 99.95% Cu, making it one of the purest metals in usage.

Phelps Dodge owns another copper mine in Morenci, Arizona. That mine is expected to produce 150 million pounds a year from its copper concentrator. That plant was idled in 2000 and the restart cost this year was estimated at over $100 million.

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