Located 2,870 metres above sea level in Northern Chile, the Chuquicamata mine is without question one of the jewels in the crown of Codelco, the world’s No. 1 copper producer.
But the centenary mine has only ten more productive years left, so the Chilean-owned company has embarked on a plan to transform the world’s largest open-pit mine into an $4.2 billion underground operation, with a projected output rate of 140,000 tonnes of ore per day.
Check below how the expansion project is coming along:
[meteor_slideshow slideshow=”chile-turns-worlds-largest-open-pit-copper-mine-into-an-underground-operation” metadata=”timeout: 150000, speed: 150000 “]
All images courtesy of Codelco via Flickr
3 Comments
Bill Scanlon
I believe you meant 140,000 tpd ore not copper
Bill
140,000 tonnes per day for 50 years! That is over 2.5 billion tonnes. Wow.
golddigger69
my high school chemistry teacher called it “unit analysis”–look at it and see if it makes sense.