Annual Copper Mine Production in Los Pelambres Will be 350,000 Tonnes

There is the copper mine in Los Pelambres, Chile, which Nippon Mining & Metals and its group, and Mitsubishi Materials and Mitsubishi Corporation invest 25% and 15% respectively. They and other investors aim at annual copper production to 350,000 tonnes from 330,000-tonne-mark in 2005 throughout their raising disposal of crude copper ore to 140,000 tonnes per day in February 2007 from 12-130,000 tonnes per day in 2005. There is likely to be US$5-600 million of total capital investment in the mine like construction of waste copper ore deposit, whose investment will be US$450 million, and reinforcement of ball mill capacity. In the world’s major copper mines that had been under operation for a certain period, there have been the problems of decline of copper quality for the past several years. Crude copper ore quality of the mine in Los Pelambres declined to 0.8% in 2005; that has become less than 1% since 2002. Some forecasts that will fall to around 0.6% in the future. Moreover, copper concentrate has been less than 40% since 2004. The investors deal with increase of large truck to transport copper ore from the pits, rev of the ball mill, extended ore floatation process, large cell addition, and new construction of waste ore deposit whose capacity would be 1.7 billion tonnes in Los Pelambres. Ore rroduction in Los Pelambres started in 1999. There is much production of copper and molybdenum. The post-tax profit in 2005 was US$1.158 billion, up about 5 times from 2003 following escalating prices of copper and molybdenum in the international market; the mine has grown up as one of the most highly-profitable mine in the world.