Codelco To Go Underground at Chuquicamata Copper Mine

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Chilean state-owned copper company Codelco (Santiago, Chile) has recently initiated a prefeasibility study on a large-scale transition from open pit to underground mining at the Chuquicamata copper mine, in the company’s North Division. SKM Minmetal (SKM), one of Australia’s leading engineering and project delivery firms, is the lead consultant for this project, worth $834 Million.

Located in the Antofagasta Region, in northern Chile, Chuquicamata is one of the world’s biggest open pit copper mines, covering a surface area of almost 8,000,000 m2 and a pit depth of 850 meters. Chuquicamata started operations in 1915. In 2000, the estimated mine life of the open pit was about 22 years. Hence, Codelco North Division carried out a scoping engineering study for an underground operation at Chuquicamata in order to extend the mine life by exploiting the deep resources of the orebody. The scoping study indicated that there are about 2.3 billion tons of ore with a copper grade of 0.81% and 0.04% of molybdenum, at a depth of 1,800 meters. With these results, Chuquicamata would operate until the year 2052. Production from the underground mine is expected to reach 120,000 tons per day.

The project aims to commence construction by early 2010, which will take between 5 and 6 years, given the project complexities, and will reach a production rate of 45 million tons per year of copper in the year 2020. To date, Chuquicamata has produced 2,650 million tons of copper. Current production of Codelco North Division, which also includes the Randomiro Tomic complex, is about 940,613 tons of cathodes of 99.99% copper and 17,781 tons of fine molybdenum per year.

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