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The mine has produced more copper than any other mine in history. More than 7 billion tons of material has been mined from Bingham Canyon, producing more than 18.7 million tons of copper.
Every day, Kennecott Utah Copper mines about 150,000 tons of copper ore and 270,000 tons of overburden. The copper ore, which averages about 0.6% copper, is mined at the Bingham Canyon Mine, where open pit mining began in 1906. The ore is crushed in the pit and moved by conveyer belt to the Copperton Concentrator.
At the Concentrator, the ore is ground in huge mills using steel balls and the copper is concentrated by flotation to produce a concentrate of about 28% copper. Annually, the Concentrator produces about 1,120,000 tons of copper concentrate, and more than 37,000,000 pounds of molybdenum concentrate. The copper concentrate is transported 17 miles to the smelter via a slurry pipeline.
At the smelter, the concentrate is dried in a large rotating dryer and then sent into a flash smelting furnace. It is separated into three products -- gases, which contain sulfur; slag, which is mostly silica and iron; and copper matte, which is 70% copper. After being cooled, the copper matte is crushed and fed into a flash converting furnace, which removes most of the remaining impurities to produce a molten copper, called blister, which is about 98% copper. Anode furnaces refine it further, and the copper is cast into plates called anodes, weighing about 700 pounds each and containing 99.6% copper. The Smelter produces about 240,000 tons of anode copper annually.
At the Refinery, racks of anodes are lowered into an acid solution, interleaved with stainless steel cathode starter sheets. For 10 days, an electric current is sent between the anode and the cathode, causing the copper ions to migrate from the anode to the cathode. The other impurities, including gold and silver, fall into the bottom of the tank holding the solution. This process forms a plate of 99.99% pure copper. The Refinery produces about 240,000 tons of pure copper cathodes, along with 460,000 ounces of gold and 4,150,000 ounces of silver as by-products.
An anode will produce two cathodes, each weighing about 280 pounds. The copper cathodes are Kennecott Utah Copper's finished product. They are stripped from the starter sheets, strapped together in 5,000-pound bundles, loaded onto rail cars, and shipped to the customer.
