Mine facts
Historical Facts
- Ranchers, not miners, discovered Bingham Canyon.
- Soldiers from Fort Douglas in Salt Lake discovered the first ore, which was lead, not copper.
- Large-scale open-pit copper mining began in the early 1900s and created a mining boom in Bingham Canyon.
- At one time, Bingham Canyon’s population was about 20,000, with people from 40 different countries living there.
- The Utah Copper Company was formed in 1903 to mine and process Bingham Canyon ore.
- Some of the steam shovels that started digging the open-pit mine in 1906 were the same kind used to dig the Panama Canal (some old-timers said they were the same shovels).
- Kennecott Corporation purchased Utah Copper Company in 1936.
- During World War II, one-third of the copper used by the Allies in the war effort came from this Mine.
- Bingham Canyon itself is today being filled with waste rock.
Production Facts
- The Bingham Canyon Mine is about three-quarters of a mile deep and 2 ¾ miles across at the top.
- The ore in the Bingham Canyon Mine is low grade -- about 6/10 of one percent – so a ton of ore contains about 13 pounds of copper.
- The Mine’s largest electric shovel has a 56-cubic-yard dipper that can scoop about 98 tons in one bite (that’s the equivalent of about 50 automobiles).
- A haul truck driver rides about 18 feet – or nearly two stories – above the ground.
- If you stretched out all the haul roads in the Mine, you would have a 500-mile road, about the distance from Salt Lake City to Denver.
- The conveyor that takes the ore from the Mine’s in-pit crusher to the Copperton Concentrator is five miles long, running three miles through the mountain and two miles over land.
- The 3,000-cubic-foot flotation cells at the Copperton Concentrator are some of the largest in the world.
- The concentrate is about 26 percent copper.
- Kennecott’s modernized Smelter is the cleanest smelting complex in the world, capturing 99.95 percent of the sulfur in the concentrate and converting it to sulfuric acid.
- The 720-pound anodes produced at the Smelter contain 99.5 percent copper and traces of precious metals.
- The Refinery, the final step in the copper production process, produces about 240,000 tons of 99.99 percent pure copper every year, along with 460,000 ounces of gold and 4,150,000 ounces of silver as by-products.
Copper Facts
- Every person in America uses about 30 pounds of copper each year.
- The Statue of Liberty contains about 100 tons or copper.
- The typical new home contains about 500 pounds of copper in wiring, plumbing and brass fixtures.
- You can roll copper into sheets as thin as 1/1,000th of an inch.
- Copper boils at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while water boils at 212 degrees.
- “Copper” comes fro kyprios, the Greek word for the island of Cyprus, where ancient people mined copper.
